A joke that’s been making the rounds the last few years is this: Hollywood is high school with money.
Allow me my own variation: America is high school with napalm.
How do I justify this harsh assessment?
Recent reports that the combined costs of the Iraqi-Afghani wars have now surpassed 3 trillion dollars.
Now to get a better picture of what that kind of cash amounts to, consider this: The combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan is about 60 million. If instead of the 3 trillion being spent on bombs, America had chosen to, it could have given each man, woman and infant 50,000 dollars.
The question springs to mind: why hasn’t America chosen the bribery route instead of prolonged and apparently ineffective bloodshed?
Well, cynics might point out that fear lasts a lot longer than gratitude. “If you want to make a man your enemy lend him money,” warn the knowledgeable.
Cynics also warn that if America started giving money to turn enemies into allies, more impoverished countries would become hostile in order to gain bribes to behave.
Perhaps.
But I still like the high school explanation.
Much of American mentality has been formed by high school and especially by high school football. “War” is ceaselessly waged between small towns, their teams venturing forth into enemy territory to bravely fight for glory and to risk humiliating defeat. Gridiron combat gets the juices flowing and entertains these small town warriors and their proud families. Uniforms and victory are intoxicating. The Red Cross and the Peace Corp are wimpy.
All this coupled with the constant drum beating that all things foreign are inferior and foreigners can never be emulated or respected, is the sound track to the American marching band.
There is also a very real practicality to this eternal zest for battle. After the first world war America reduced it’s armed forced to the point where its standing army was the 22nd largest in the world. When war clouds gathered at the beginning of the 1930’s America had to scramble to rearm. The second world war quite naturally taught America to always be muscular and ready.
And to insure readiness a healthy little war is required every single decade. You cannot have a generation or two go by peacefully, because you’ll end up with a military that has never fought a war. Eternal war has many positive benefits:
1 - On the job training makes military people better warriors.
2 – Bombs and planes and other weapons that have been used, have to be replaced – and with newer and better bombs and planes. This creates jobs in the homeland (What does America continue to do best? Manufacture lethal products) and weapon development insures that America stays several steps ahead of the competition, both on the battle field but also in the marketplace. American arms sales abroad equal or exceed money leaving the country to buy drugs. The “pushing” goes both ways.
3 – If America sent 50,000 dollars to every man, woman and child in Iraq and Afghanistan, most, if not all of the money would be spent to buy products made in other nearby countries. But when spent mainly on bombs American workers benefit.
In the British comedy, The Mouse That Roared, a tiny fictional country declared war on Britain, then immediately surrendered in order to receive aid.
Perhaps America might benefit from a fictional enemy, like the residents of Atlantis or Avatar’s Pandora? We could drop all our napalm in the middle of the Pacific ocean and tell our citizens we were hammering the enemy. New bombs could then been ordered, jobs secured – both in factories and in the Pentagon.
An absurd idea?
Isn’t that exactly what we did in Iraq?
