Our Endless War

[unhappycamper]

Our Endless War
Bangor Daily News Editorial
Published on Wednesday, September 22, 2010 by The Bangor Daily News (Maine)

Hardly any American can be comfortable with the assertion of a senior Pentagon planner, Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schissler, that “We’re in a generational war.”

He predicted in 2006 that American conflicts would last another 50 or 100 years.

Yet no one could be elected president who seriously questioned whether the United States must continue indefinitely to help police Iraq and Afghanistan, keep thousands of U.S. troops in bases strung around the world, and maintain enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major foreign city.

A provocative new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” describes an unspoken national consensus that has grown up during the past 60 years. The author, Andrew J. Bascevich, is a retired Army colonel and now a professor at Boston University. He calls it a “sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”

These Washington rules, he writes, were forged after World War II, when American power and influence were near their heights. He warns that Washington now commands less respect: “Americans can ill afford to indulge any longer in dreams of saving the world, much less remaking it in our own image.”

[Philosoraptor]

1. Rome wasn't built and didn't fall in a day

[w8liftinglady]

2. and...the corporations are still making too much money to pull out now.