The Cost of War
by Dave Bradley As I write this it is the 25th Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is also the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s often cited farewell speech, commonly known as his “Military-Industrial Complex” speech.
To me, the true essence of Dr. King is probably best summed up in one of his lesser known speeches. Dr. King gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at Riverside Church in New York City exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis. This was a speech which directly confronted the issues of racism, poverty and militarism in the United States of that day. It is still well worth a read.
Nearly 50 years later we see rising problems in all of these areas. Racism seems to be peaking again, with more groups taking the abuse. Laws recently enacted in Arizona are a fine example. Muslims continue to be singled out for unhinged hate by the likes of Glenn Beck.
In the past 30 years since the dawn of the Reagan era in America, wealth continues to accumulate to the top 1%. The top 1% (@ 3 million people) has more accumulated wealth than the bottom 95% (about 285 million people). Laws and court rulings that favor the rich make this even more unlikely to change. With the Citizens United ruling last year, do not expect any change, as the rich can buy politicians even more blatantly than ever. Here is a link to a pie chart that is scary:
Now let’s turn to militarism. America’s business these days is war. We manufacture and sell the tools of war. We make little else here in America today because industry has abandoned factories for much lower priced labor abroad. There is no intention to rebuild here. Heck, business even gets tax breaks for relocating abroad. So without wars and the threat of wars, our economy would most likely collapse.
Dwight Eisenhower’s statement on war – “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity” – pretty much summed up his attitude toward war. Yet despite being probably the most knowledgeable man of his day on the effects of war, Eisenhower’s many warnings, including the one issued 50 years ago, went unheeded.
Shortly after becoming president, Eisenhower made this statement on the cost of war:
So just what have we spent on the two wars that drone on and on in obscurity in the Middle East? There is a website that attempts to quantify the costs and gives a breakdown by location just what we have spent just in money. Johnson County alone has spent approximately $333,000,000 – one third of a billion dollars. How many schools, how much health care, how much research, how many road repairs is that? The list goes on and the waste of life, of resources and especially the waste of our future mounts up.
In 1967 at Riverside Church Dr. King described the “fierce urgency of now.” President Eisenhower argued over and over against the senselessness of war. Yet half a century later we ignore their prescient and urgent messages.
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Dave Bradley is a self-described
retired observer of American politics “trying to figure out how we got
so screwed up.” An
Iowa City native currently living in West Liberty, Dave and his wife
Carol have two grown children who “sadly had to leave the state to find
decent paying jobs.“
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