Neocons are a most peculiar group of folks and they dominate the Republican Party. They worship the empire, the wars, the military and and all the inhumane evil that accompanies our brutal and barbarous foreign policy. Their lust for empire is so great that they would gladly sacrifice the constitution and even economic prosperity on the alter of empire. While the Democrats claim to have the humanitarian moral high ground, they too worship the state, its wars and the empire.
In fact, it was the progressives, liberals and Democrats got us into WW I, WW II, the Korean War, Vietnam War and the Balkan Wars. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton were all empire building militarists as well as highly revered Democrats and progressives.
Except for a handful of liberty activists, anti-war folks, Ron Paul supporters and a few decent Democrats in the mold of Dennis Kucinich, America has literally morphed into some horror that is beginning to resemble Nazi Germany.
As the economy continues to plunge into the dark abyss and profound human suffering escalates in America, few Americans understand that the root cause of our misery is directly attributable to military spending and endless wars. Yet, the government is somehow always successful in selling the propaganda that wars and murder are good for the US economy.
What most Americans cannot grasp is the simple fact that the US military is morphing into the global governance military of the United Nations.
TomDispatch.com has an interesting piece on the US empire.
The True Costs of Empire
We built, for example, 505 bases at the cost of billions of dollars in Iraq (without a single reporter uncovering anything close to that number until we abandoned all of them in 2011). Over the years, millions of soldiers, private contractors, spies, civilian employees of the U.S. government, special ops types, and who knows who else spent time on them, as undoubtedly did hundreds of reporters, and yet news of those American ziggurats was rare to vanishing. On the whole, reporters on bases so large that one had a 27-mile fortified perimeter, multiple bus lines, and its own electricity grid and water-bottling plant generally looked elsewhere for their “news.”It may be a tragic irony that Republican and Democrat Americans willingly drink the poisonous neocon Koolaid but history is always the great vindicator. It's practically a law of physics that every empire in human history ultimately bites the dust and always through currency devaluation/debasement and bankruptcy. America is already there and it's only a matter of time before the full impact of our obsession with empire finally reduces us to a pathetic and poverty stricken nation.
Our latest base-building mania: Washington’s expanding "empire of bases" for its secret CIA and Special Forces drone wars in the Greater Middle East goes almost unnoticed (except at sites like this). We now, for instance, have a drone base in the Seychelles, an archipelago that evidently needs an infusion of money. Unless you had the dough for a high-end wedding in the middle of the Indian Ocean or a vacation in “paradise,” you’ve probably never heard of the place.
No matter. You’re still paying for the deployment of 82 people to those islands to fly and land crash-prone drones in our now endless “covert” robotic air wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa. With the so-called fiscal cliff now eternally on the media horizon, there’s been reporting recently on how your tax dollars are being spent, but do you have the faintest idea what it actually costs you to garrison the globe? No? Then you’re in good company, and the Pentagon certainly isn’t interested in telling you either.
Fortunately, basing expert and TomDispatch regular David Vine decided to make sense of what garrisoning the planet means to our pocketbooks. Read this piece and you’ll know what it costs all of us to build and support that Baseworld and more generally the American global military presence. Think about it: at the cost of possibly $2 trillion since 9/11, it should be one of the stories of the century. If it were, maybe by now we would be starting to pull back from the “military cliff.”
$2 trillion spent on the wars since 9/11? Soon enough, we'll be choking on the empire and its ashes as the freest and most prosperous nation in human history joins the trash heap of history and empire.
