{"id":1001936,"date":"2023-02-22T14:07:11","date_gmt":"2023-02-22T14:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=138040"},"modified":"2023-02-22T14:07:11","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T14:07:11","slug":"dictators-bent-on-building-military-empires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/02\/22\/dictators-bent-on-building-military-empires\/","title":{"rendered":"Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future\u2026 A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire<\/a> will never be able to ease the people\u2019s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free.<\/p>\n

\u2014 President Biden<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, the hypocrisy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To hear President Biden talk about Russia\u2019s aggression against Ukraine<\/a>, you might imagine that Putin is the only dictator bent on expanding his military empire through the use of occupation, aggression and oppression.<\/p>\n

Yet the United States is no better, having spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.<\/p>\n

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.<\/p>\n

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine<\/a> has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion<\/a> and shows no signs of abating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Clearly, it\u2019s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.<\/p>\n

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million<\/em> men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas<\/a> in nearly every country in the world.<\/p>\n

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman<\/a>. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.<\/p>\n

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon\u2019s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of \u201coperational security and denying the enemy any advantage<\/a>.\u201d As investigative journalist David Vine explains, \u201cAlthough few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Incredibly, America\u2019s military forces aren\u2019t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they\u2019re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reach of America\u2019s military empire<\/a> includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries<\/a>, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, \u201cEven US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.<\/p>\n

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost<\/a>, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.<\/p>\n

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.<\/p>\n

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe<\/a>, these wars abroad aren\u2019t making America\u2014or the rest of the world\u2014any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.<\/p>\n

War spending is bankrupting America.<\/p>\n

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure<\/a>, spending more<\/a> on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined<\/a> spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.<\/p>\n

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.<\/p>\n

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America\u2019s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq<\/a> than the average American earns in a year.<\/p>\n

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn\u2019t have on a military empire it can\u2019t afford.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, even if we were to put an end to all of the government\u2019s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government\u2019s creditors off our backs.<\/p>\n

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card<\/a>, \u201cessentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.\u201d<\/p>\n

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors<\/a>. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon\u2019s largest agencies \u201ccan\u2019t account for hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of spending<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the outlook isn\u2019t much better for the spending that can be tracked.<\/p>\n

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers<\/a> for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid<\/a>:<\/p>\n

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That price gouging<\/a> has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control \u201cwe the people\u201d have over our runaway government.<\/p>\n

Mind you, this isn\u2019t just corrupt behavior. It\u2019s deadly, downright immoral behavior.<\/p>\n

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.<\/p>\n

That needs to change.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer.<\/em> It\u2019s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes<\/a>. Since 9\/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government is not making America any safer.<\/em> It\u2019s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government\u2019s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America\u2019s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The 9\/11 attacks were blowback<\/a>. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback<\/a>. The attempted Times Square bomber<\/a> was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The U.S. military\u2019s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.<\/p>\n

The war hawks\u2019 militarization of America\u2014bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield\u2014is also blowback.<\/p>\n

James Madison was right: \u201cNo nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.\u201d As Madison explained, \u201cOf all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes\u2026 known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.<\/p>\n

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure<\/a> through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.<\/p>\n

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:<\/p>\n

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy.<\/a> Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the \u201cunwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex\u201d that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.<\/p>\n

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war\u2014one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.<\/p>\n

We failed to heed his warning.<\/p>\n

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People<\/em><\/a> and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries<\/em><\/a>, war is the enemy of freedom.<\/p>\n

As long as America\u2019s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, \u201cwe the people\u201d will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.<\/p>The post Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Autocrats only understand one word: no, no, no. No you will not take my country, no you will not take my freedom, no you will not take my future\u2026 A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease the people\u2019s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of [\u2026]<\/p>\n

The post Dictators Bent on Building Military Empires<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188,501,24084,1720,942,361,49,1178,135,51,165,417],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2000"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1001937,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001936\/revisions\/1001937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}