WALLACE - In our household, growing up, there wasn't much difference between the words Pacifist and Fascist. Fascists are still despicable, although they seem to be in charge of things these days.
Back then Pacifist was just another word for draft-dodger. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe we should give the Pacifists a try; I'm not sure the Fascists are doing a very good job.
There was a touching story last Sunday on CBS' Sunday Morning show, which is the only network television worth watching anymore. It featured children of soldiers returning from the various wars we are engaged in in faraway places.
The soldiers come back with lost limbs, lost bodily functions, with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and can't deal with family life anymore. These kids feel abandoned by their daddies, veterans who spend their new civilian time looking for jobs and for snipers and IEDs. Helluva life. Welcome home.
“We Support Our Troops.” I am so sick of that bumper-sticker I could hurl a pineapple into the next rig I see wearing one. Of course we support our troops. They are our countrymen. We should be supporting our Steel Workers and Iron Workers and Electrical Workers, and our miners and plumbers, too. We're all cut from the same cloth.
How about a new bumper sticker: “We Support Our Troops but Damn Our Foreign Policy.” These brave young men and women who come home with their limbs torn off are patriots but the foreign policy that sends them into danger is anything but patriotic. They are sent off on a fool's errand, to defend America's hegemony in the Middle East and elsewhere and for what? Liberty? Freedom? Oil? Gas? Coal?
No. The real thing they're fighting for - though they don't learn it as young boots - is the petro-dollar. The petro-dollar was the devil's deal Richard Nixon made with the House of Saud back in 1971. In essence, he pledged the lives of young Americans to the defense of the the Saudis, if the Saudis would in turn sell their oil only for US dollars, instead of for gold, silver, or for the currencies of other nations.
The move reinforced the U.S. dollar as the world's “reserve currency” so if you were French and had to buy gas or oil, you first had to buy U.S. dollars with your francs. Francs were tied to gold, but U.S. dollars were flying off printing presses. It angered Charles de Gaulle so much that he kicked U.S. military forces out of his country and issued the ominous and prophetic warning that no country which could not back its money with gold and yet hold such power could lead the world to ruin.
Nixon's Treasury Secretary, John Connally, famously said at that time, “It's our currency, and your problem.”
How would you feel, if you were a father of a family in Brazil, or the mother of a family in Germany, if somebody spat in your face like that? That the work you did was only of value determined by some big country in North America?
Saddam Hussein's butchery of his countrymen was of no concern to us. He was our ally, remember? But then, he proposed a bourse, or stock-exchange, that would trade Iraq's oil for gold and silver and other currencies, not just U.S. dollars. And that angered everybody of importance in the U.S. and its banking system.
“This will not stand,” said our president, George Herbert Walker Bush, former head of the CIA. So launched was World War III, version 0.1. Desert Storm, he called it. There was other logic behind Desert Storm, which was to show the Russians what nasty new technology we had.
We spooked the Russians and spanked the financial markets. But consequences only last for a little while, maybe a generation. The Russians are angry, and have caught up militarily, and most of Europe and Asia a are bit surly about our cute stunts.
So we send our children into the IEDs and the flamethrowers to prove to the world that we're still the big dogs.
Why? Certainly we need a Department of Defense, and it should be just that. Our country is vulnerable to missile attacks, so let's spend our money trying our best to defend ourselves. But the DoD's job is defense, not war.
The men (and I am sure women) who founded this nation were refugees from an empire. Why must we repeat this empire mistake, and throw our children in the wood-chippers of modern technology in the process? We have the copper, silver, gold, coal, oil and rare-earth metals to supply the planet for a century. Other folks want it. Let us peacefully trade with them, and bring our kids home.
Please.
