Really, Why Does Anybody Care?
by James Glaser
August 23, 2011

Our nightly news is covering Brrack Obama's War in Libya like it is the most important thing going on in the world today. Right now, we are very close to having the bloodiest month in our ten year war in Afghanistan, but Libya is front page.

Libya, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia never had the means with which they could attack us. In fact, until a few years ago Muammar Gaddafi was well thought of in Washington and London. Here is how the Globe and Mail reported it:

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw hailed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi as "statesmanlike and courageous" for his decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction programmes. Gaddafi's admission that he had tried to develop WMD but was now ready to disarm was dramatically disclosed by Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In research spanning many years, Tripoli had come close to developing a nuclear bomb and had "significant" chemical and biological weapons programmes, British sources said.

Mr Straw made clear that Gaddafi's initiative had cleared the way for the lifting of US sanctions against Libya, which could now rejoin the international community after more than a decade as a pariah state.

So, Gaddafi got the sanctions lifted from Libya by renouncing weapons of mass destruction, but when Barack Obama wanted to go to war with him, reports started surfacing that he still had them and was ready to use them. Does that sound like what happened to Saddam Hussein? One year he is our new friend, and when we no longer needed him, he becomes a pariah.

Other than the fact that thousands of Americans are getting killed, wounded, or will suffer the rest of their lives with combat stress, I don't care about any of these wars. Not one country we are fighting or actively bombing has the resources with which to attack us.

I really believe that most of the countries we are fighting have so many internal problems that attacking the United States of America was not even in their thoughts. President Obama and our current Congress have kept us fighting in the wars George Bush started, and have pushed us into new wars for the same reason Bush and his Congress started his wars. MONEY!

But this story has been around for a long time. We have not been able to get off the war economy that took us out of the Depression. With every new war (except for Vietnam) we put up new military bases and leave troops in the country we attacked. We have been doing that since 1945. Now we have hundreds of thousands of our troops stationed in foreign countries all over the globe, and many Americans are getting very rich by having contracts to supply those troops with everything from weapons to bed linens.

We start new wars to expand the number of troops stationed around the world, which means greater profits for the Defense Industry. Wars are a real spike in profits for those who make and sell us the weapons we use, but those military bases around the world are a long term steady income.

I don't believe we even know how to get off the war economy. We have been on it so long, and it employs so many people, we are afraid to try anything new, because of the lag time in the change-over. Though it be a painful thing to say, millions of Americans now make their living off the killing of other people. It is the sad, shameful truth.

So, I don't care about all these countries we attack. First off, I don't believe that they would or will attack us. They don't have the troops, the equipment, or even the desire. They have so many of their own problems to deal with, a war with us will not help them.

And here we are stuck with the problem that for over 60 years we have been fighting wars to keep our economy strong. We have borrowed trillions of dollars to pay for these wars, and we have now come to the point that we probably won't be able to borrow enough to keep everything going. That means sometime in the future those troops will start to come home, the corporations that make their profits supplying those troops will lose their contracts and their profits, too. That means layoffs on a mass scale.

I'll say it again, I don't care about our wars, and I don't care that we will not be able to continue fighting them. Why? Because some time we will have to "bite the bullet" and stop killing people, unfortunately, not because it is wrong, but because we can no longer afford it. Millions of Americans will lose their jobs, and hundreds of thousands of Soldiers and Marines, Sailors and Airmen will be thrown into the labor market at the same time the Defense Industry has huge layoffs.

Yes, it is going to be rough, but it is our own fault, and history tells us the same thing happens to every other country that depended on expansion to keep going. Every country in history reached a point that they could no longer afford to be on top, and we are in that same fix.

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