The Trillion-Dollar Illusion
Washington spends all that money and is still unable to defend its Persian Gulf bases.
The latest American-Israeli aggression against Iran has exposed the United States’ inability to defend our big bases in the Gulf Countries and smaller bases in Iraq. For decades, these countries have had to endure the ire of their populations who are unhappy with the presence of U.S. forces in their lands. Their citizens are painfully aware of the U.S. and Israeli mass destruction and murder of their Muslim brothers. This may become a source of instability as war escalates.
Our leaders bribed and coerced the Persian Gulf family monarchies into accepting U.S. military bases in their countries. The regimes justified the American presence because the “most powerful military in history” would protect them. How has that worked out? The Persian Gulf states are now experiencing devastating daily missile attacks from Iran because the Iranians are blaming them for supporting and participating in the Israel/U.S. aggression. How did they not consider that possibility when they encouraged this U.S. aggression? Iran warned them.
One of Osama Bin Laden’s chief complaints was the sacrilege of U.S. military bases in the Muslim Holy Land. The Gulf state leaders must have been watching too much Fox News or the other news outlets controlled by friends of Benjamin Netanyahu. Their foolish decisions now threaten the stability of their regimes. Also, if Iran is turned into a non-functioning country, there will be nothing to protect the Gulf states from predation by Israel.
As the war against Iran grinds on, the Gulf state leaders are becoming acutely aware of just how much the U.S. regime prioritizes Israel over them. It also galls other “allies” of the U.S. regime that Israel, the root cause of the war, is receiving resupply of Patriot missile interceptors at their expense.
In addition, we are now witnessing as they increasingly realize that the various U.S. and Israeli missile defense systems provide no serious defense against hyper-sonic missiles. This was a long-suppressed fact exposed during the Ukrainian War. The U.S. elite don’t want Americans to know, but Iran, Russia, China, Hezbollah, and even Ansar Allah (the Houthis) know full well how to successfully overwhelm and defeat U.S. missile defense systems. The Iranians are demonstrating this daily. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is too busy cheerleading to notice. President Donald Trump is clueless. Our mocking bird press maintains the pro-war narrative of phony U.S. successes.
Our military is still extremely powerful and able to cause wreckage all over the world. It is our leaders’ competence and judgment that is in serious question. Look what chaos they are wreaking on Iran and what Israel is doing in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria with the arms and money we have given them.
The whole country of Iran has a GDP of less than 500 billion dollars. That is less than one half of what the U.S. regime spends on military alone in a year, yet Iran has destroyed most of the U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf and is wreaking havoc on Israel. The U.S. carrier groups are positioned more than 700 miles away from Iran because they are wary of the Iranian missile capability and the inadequate U.S. defense capabilities. And, as they had warned, the Iranians have gained control of the Strait of Hormuz. Israeli/U.S. leaders appear to be surprised. Their plan appears to have been: Pretend to negotiate, get the Iranians to gather their leaders to consider the offers, then kill them all and hope the country would collapse. Quick and easy and over in a few days. Another cake walk. It appears that the intelligence and planning was happily provided by Netanyahu and his vaunted Israeli intelligence, who had people assigned to the White House. They desire the destruction of Iran in spite of the price. The rest didn’t matter to them, so U.S. leaders were not encouraged to consider planning for other contingencies.
For example, the Trump administration spent a couple of months and billions of dollars last year vainly attempting to crush the Yemeni Ansar Allah who have been threatening ships transiting through the Red Sea. The U.S. carrier group had to retreat from the Yemeni missiles. The Trump administration made a deal to leave them alone.
The long list of countries wrecked by the U.S. since the Second World War, but not conquered, is shocking. We spent many trillions of dollars and spread only death and destruction. None of the wars for democracy ended up with democracy. Their promise to protect civilians from cruel dictators in fact killed and wounded more civilians than the cruel dictator would have done. The rhetoric was created to bamboozle the hapless American people into supporting these cruel fiascoes.
And the chest-beating about our possessing the most powerful military in the world only appears to be credible because we have spent the past two decades fighting small militias with small arms. This war is the real thing, against a bonafide middle power, and we are doing badly. We have gold-plated military equipment approaching obsolescence and designed to enrich defense contractors and lobbyists at the expense of practical and effective systems. Yes, the U.S. can bomb and kill all day, but can it achieve strategic objectives at an acceptable cost?
In 1953, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the Second World War, said it best about the costs we pay for militarism:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…
It calls upon [governments] to answer the question that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?
Seventy-three years later, the numbers are worse, and we now have 39 trillion dollars of debt. At least the bombers, fighters, and destroyers in those days functioned as advertised. We are being willfully deceived by our leaders who paint failures as successes. Congressional leaders are crippled and corrupted by the money, and are unwilling to end this madness. We should wake up and stop it before the world suffers more.
If Donald Trump were to decide to become a truly brave leader, he could declare he was misinformed by foreign aligned intelligence sources and he has realized the three-day cakewalk was a fantasy. In order to end the death and destruction and the risk of a global depression, he would order the termination of ALL arms transfers into the Middle East.
Mr. President, work out a reasonable deal with Iran, which they would probably welcome, and bring our troops home to save and protect them from being killed or wounded and the world economy wrecked.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-trillion-dollar-illusion/