If you’re not allowed to enslave people any more, or even loot their resources, then what

[sad sally]

is the point of being a traditional great power?

The United States kept an army of over 100,000 soldiers in Iraq for eight years, at a cost that will probably end up around a trillion dollars. Yet it didn’t enslave a single Iraqi (though it killed quite a lot), and throughout the occupation it paid full market price for Iraqi oil. So what American purpose did the entire enterprise serve?

Oh, silly me. I forgot. It was about “security”. And here it comes again, on an even bigger scale.

Last Friday, at the Pentagon, President Barack Obama unveiled America’s new “defense strategy.” But it wasn’t actually about stopping anybody from invading the United States. That cannot happen. It was about reshaping the US military in a way that “preserves American global leadership, maintains our military superiority,” as Obama put it.
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In effect, the new US defense strategy says that for the United States to be safe, everybody else must be weaker. This displays a profound ignorance of human psychology – unless, of course, it is just a cynical device to convince the American public to spend a lot on “defense”.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/09-6?du

[cthulu2016]

1. It is to protect our way of life

And our way of live is military over-involvement.

One big circle.

[sad sally]

2. 100% correct.

Over the last decade, this country has been so strikingly militarized that no one can imagine 10 years of serious government planning or investment not connected to the military or the national security state. It’s a dangerous world out there — so we’re regularly told by officials who don’t mention that no military is built to handle the scariest things around. War and the sinews of war are now our business, and the U.S. military is our go-to outfit of choice for anything from humanitarian action to diplomacy (even though that same military can’t do the one thing it’s theoretically built to do: win a modern war). And if you don’t believe me that the militarization of this country is a process far gone, check out the last pages of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent piece, “America’s Pacific Century,” in Foreign Policy magazine. Then close your eyes and tell me that it wasn’t written by a secretary of defense, rather than a secretary of state — right down to the details about the “littoral combat ships” we’re planning to deploy to Singapore and the “greater American military presence” in Australia.

from Energy Wars 2012
by Michael T. Klare and Tom Engelhardt, January 11, 2012

(article can be found at the DU-banned antiwar.com site)