Dear CCI Followers,
Please read what Andrew Bacevich writes below, which disagrees with our current U.S. policy makers. Why? Because it is finally clear to all that these wars make enormous amounts of money for the United States.
Early on, Bacevich, as a West Point graduate, apparently was convinced of the rightness of U.S. military endeavors. He left the military as a Colonel to weigh in with yet another message: that is, our worldwide wars have caused horrendous levels of death, suffering and destruction in the countries we’ve entered. Further, these are wars that we will never win, but we keep fighting anyway. Does this make sense? It does from the money level. But Bacevich urges leaving and reexamining our entire policy of military engagements and exploring diplomacy.
May his clarity and passion gain traction with both our Congress members, who sign off on these huge annual expenditures, and with the U.S. public, which is finally becoming better informed!
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Yes, It’s Time to Come Home Now
Actually ending the war in Afghanistan.
November 24, 2020
By: Andrew Bacevich
Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out
Ding-dong! the merry-oh sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the wicked witch is dead!
Within establishment circles, Donald Trump’s failure to win re-election has prompted merry singing and bell-ringing galore. If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC, the song featured in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz nicely captures the mood of the moment.
As a consequence, expectations for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to put America back on the path to the Emerald City after a dispiriting four-year detour are sky-high. The new administration will defeat Covid-19, restore prosperity, vanquish racism, reform education, expand healthcare coverage, tackle climate change, and provide an effective and humane solution to the problem of undocumented migrants. Oh, and Biden will also return the United States to its accustomed position of global leadership. And save America’s soul to boot.
So we are told.
That these expectations are deemed even faintly credible qualifies as passing strange. After all, the outcome of the 2020 presidential election turned less on competing approaches to governance than on the character of the incumbent. It wasn’t Joe Biden as principled standard-bearer of enlightened twenty-first-century liberalism who prevailed. It was Joe Biden, a retread centrist pol who emerged as the last line of defense shielding America and the world from four more years of Donald Trump.