An end to war?

An end to war? It's certainly necessary, but is it politically possible?

The fate of House Resolution 476, introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee, will give us a clue how close ‘we’, by which I mean the leading military power on the planet, are to transcending our suicidal certainties.

The wording of this bill concludes thus: “Congress supports moves to reduce the priority given to war in our foreign policy and our current war-based national economy by using significant cuts, up to $350,000,000,000 as detailed above, from current budget plans, while using the funds to increase our diplomatic capacity and for domestic programs that will keep our Nation and our people safer.”

The bill, introduced in the House on June 15, has been sent off to several committees, the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where God knows what, if anything, will happen. The bill reads as though it were composed in an alternative universe. Here are some of the points it makes as it seeks to justify slicing the bloated defense budget virtually in half:

“... every hour taxpayers are paying $32,080,000 for the total cost of wars since 2001, and these endless wars have not made Americans safer or brought democracy or stability to the Middle East, indeed they have further destabilized the region and show no sign of actually ending or achieving any of the long-ago stated goals.

“... interviews with senior military leaders and other senior officials showed many believed the war in Afghanistan to be unwinnable and knowingly misled the public for years.

“... despite concerns about depriving the troops of funding, in 2019 half the military budget went directly to military manufacturing corporations whose top five CEOs in 2018 averaged $22,000,000 in salaries, while 15.3 percent of members of the Armed Forces serving on active duty and their families reported they were food insecure.”

And so much more!

In response to the cynical gasps I imagine I hear as I ponder this legislation, I note to myself: Well, this is a good start. Peace activists have been struggling for political traction, which is to say political sanity, for my entire lifetime, and no doubt well beyond that. When it comes to politics, narrow thinking rules! We have enemies out there. And the only way to handle an enemy is to clobber it into submission ... then move on to the next one.

Not even Albert Einstein could penetrate this smug ignorance. Splitting the atom, he realized, was only part of the discovery process ... the easy part. With the development of nuclear weapons, humanity had placed itself – placed the entire living planet – on the brink of non-existence. Now it needed to expand its awareness socially and politically.

Excerpted: ‘Confronting America's Obscene Military Budget’

Commondreams.org