Why America Needs War
Abstract
America has been at war continuously ever since it was formed in 1776. But wars are destructive of a country’s economy. So why is the US always fighting wars, far more than any other country, and often tens of thousands of miles away from its borders? These are the questions that this article tries to answer. The answers can be found in the power structure and the control of media that exist in the USA.
Almost 250 Years of War
It is now 2024. The United States will be 248 years old this July. For their entire history of almost two and a half centuries, the USA has been continuously at war. From 1776 until about 1915 or so, most of America’s wars were with the original inhabitants of what is today the United States, the Native Americans. For about 150 years since the formation of America, the American government waged wars on these peoples, stole their land, and confined the few natives who had not been exterminated by war or disease to relatively small “reservations” in order to steal their natural resources. Having once established their complete control over the entire land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans (helped by two major land purchases — the Louisiana Purchase from France and the purchase of Alaska from Russia), America turned its gaze on the rest of the world. But there were international wars that punctuated even the period of the wars with the natives. For instance, the US fought wars along with its European allies to subjugate non-White civilizations, such as the Barbary Wars (1801–5, 1815) in the Mediterranean and the Second Opium War (1856–60) against China. In 1846–48, the US went to war with Mexico and won, with huge ramifications for its overall territory, winning California, Texas, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. In 1898, the US went to war against Spain and won the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines. In 1899–1901, the US was part of the Western alliance that completely ended Chinese sovereignty by crushing the Boxer rebellion and imposing Western hegemony on China. By the dawn of the 20th century, the USA had fully established itself among the community of White Imperialist nations, frequently throwing in its lot with its White European partners. But it was still a junior partner at this stage, given that this was the heyday of the British Empire.
In the 20th century, the US mostly involved itself in international wars. During the first half of the 20th century, barring the first World War, most of America’s wars were in the local region, with wars against Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Dominican Republic. The US also participated in the Russian Civil War (1917–23) against the Bolsheviks. The US was one of the two big victors of the Second World War (1939–45), along with the USSR, against the Axis triumvirate of Japan, Italy, and Germany, its rise coinciding with the demise of the British Empire. Following WWII, the US was involved in constant proxy war against the USSR in the ideological confrontation known as the Cold War — in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Congo, Guatemalan Republic, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Angola, Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The US continued its interference in Caribbean affairs with wars and coups in Haiti, Grenada, and Panama.
The US is considered to have won the Cold War in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But this did not stop America’s prosecution of wars. If anything, with no one to fear any longer, American warmongering increased. In 1991, the US invaded Iraq, and its military operations in the Persian Gulf never ended from that point on. In 1992–1995, the US involved itself in the Somali Civil War; in 1992–1995, again, the US was involved in the Yugoslav Civil War; in 1994–95, the US again intervened in Haitian politics by invasion; in 1998–99, the US returned to war in the Balkans with the Kosovo war; in 2001, following the al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the US launched itself into a 20-year war in Afghanistan, which ended only in 2021 with an ignominious retreat from that country; in 2002, the US sided with Saudi Arabia in a war with Yemen, that is still ongoing; in 2003, the US invaded Iraq under the false pretext that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, and captured and executed Saddam Hussein, with military operations continuing for a decade; from 2004–2018, in pursuit of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the US was engaged in warfare in the border area of Pakistan-Afghanistan, with daily aerial attacks on the region, along with ground operations by US forces based in Pakistan — this period also saw the execution of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in Pakistan; from 2007, the US has been involved in military operations in Somalia, which continue to today; from 2009–2016, the US was engaged in a war with Somali pirates; in 2011, the US was part of the NATO alliance that invaded Libya to depose Muammar Gaddafi; from 2011–2017, the US was involved in a civil war in Uganda; in 2013, the US was involved in a civil war in Niger in order to help the French, who supported the pro-France ruling party; in 2014, the US again went to Iraq, this time to fight the ISIS, an operation that lasted until 2021; in 2014, the US involved itself in the Syrian Civil War, and tried to depose Bashar Assad, an operation that continues until today, with the US in control of a third of Syria, including its oil fields; in 2015, the US again invaded Libya, this time to fight ISIS; and in 2022, the US was the key supplier of arms to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Why Does America Fight Endlessly?
So, you have to ask, why does the American government need endless war? I know American people. I lived there for 15 years. Ordinary Americans don’t want to kill anyone. They are wonderful, warm, hospitable, and curious people. So why does the American government want war, when the ordinary people are not warlike?
The reason is that elections cost money, and nobody has the kind of money needed to win elections except for billionaires. So, for most lawmakers, if you want to win an election, you need sponsors. You need big capitalists with lots of money — the billionaires — to give you the money you need to run advertisements and win elections. Otherwise, nobody will get to hear your message. That means that when you do win the elections, you are beholden to the billionaires who funded your election. In other words, they own you. Every single lawmaker in the US — every Congressman, Senator, every state Representative, every State Governor, and of course the President — every one of them is owned by big business interests. And it is the billionaires who want war in return for their support. The obvious question that follows is why.
Big corporates want to become more profitable. And how can a government help them become more profitable? By enabling the following:
- Cheap supply of raw materials from across the world.
- Elimination of competitors in foreign countries.
- Preferential market access worldwide.
That is why wars are needed. You need to fight wars in West Asia because the corporates want cheap oil. You want a war with China because you want them to give your companies free access to the Chinese economy which has 1.4 billion prosperous consumers, while putting Chinese companies at a disadvantage so you can later acquire them cheaply. You want a war with Russia (through a Western proxy such as Ukraine or Georgia) because Russia is a giant country with massive natural resources, both agricultural and mineral, and it would be very profitable for American companies to have control of those resources.
Of course, wars are expensive. But that is not a problem, because the corporates will not have to spend out of their pockets to finance them. They will get the US President to declare war with an executive decision, using American taxpayer money. Wars are bloody; but corporates will use American soldiers to fight them as cannon fodder. The 20-year “War on Terror” has been estimated by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University to have cost $8 trillion.
The cost of the 20-year war by the US government on Iraq and Syria, from 2003–2023, was $2.9 trillion, again according to the Costs of War Project. All that money was borrowed by the American government, and will be paid off by ordinary Americans for the next 50 years, if the country lasts that long.
But if a war is “successful,” as was the 1991 war on Iraq, guess who profits? Not the American people. It’s the big corporates. It’s the big payoff for having bankrolled all those Representatives and Senators and Governors and Presidents. The people are just useful chumps. Whenever corporate America wants a war, they simply unleash the media, which they own. Most Americans do not know that NBC is owned by Comcast, on whose board of directors sit the CEOs of PepsiCo, Dupont, Fannie Mae, Bank of New York Mellon, and Deloitte. To give another example, the New York Times, the darling of the liberals in the US, who think the newspaper is unbiased and free of corporate influence, has on its board of directors (as of the date of this post): the CEO of GoDaddy, the leading internet domain name registrar and web hosting company; the chief product officer of Roblox Corporation, a leading videogame company; the CFO of Etsy, a leading e-commerce website; the CEO of Ariel Investments; the CFO of Bumble, a leading dating app; and the COO of Reality Labs at Meta. The board is essentially corporate America. The CEOs of big banks and top corporate companies sit on the boards of directors of media companies, and the CEOs of the big media companies sit on the boards of directors of the major corporates. It is a vast incestuous family. Which is why the media will never propagate anything that goes against the interests of corporate America. And that is why every American war that the mainstream American media say is a good thing is actually in corporate America’s interest. This is why the media steadily convince most Americans that a war is absolutely necessary. After the war is over, the big boys like Bechtel, Halliburton, Exxon, Dow Chemical, Baker Hughes, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceX, etc, move in to claim the spoils. You, the ordinary citizen, don’t get a tax cut from the spoils of war. When the Persian emperor Nadir Shah invaded the Moghul Empire in Delhi in 1739 and defeated it, he carried away the entire treasury of the Moghuls to Iran. Ordinary Iranians benefited from his conquest because he gave Iranian citizens a tax holiday for three years because he was so flush with money. American citizens do not even get such benefits from America’s war victories. Those benefits go to the people who own the American politicians and the US government.
Because, that is the central tenet of electoral democracy: the profits are privatized, but the costs are socialized.
The same modus operandi has been used to hoodwink Americans into believing that the Ukrainians must be funded by America and supplied with weapons for “as long as it takes,” and that, more recently, Israel must be helped in its genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza with American money and weapons for as long as it takes, no matter how many innocent Palestinian civilians die. What the billionaires care about is not Ukraine or Israel; it is the control of resources that winning those wars will get them. Even while the war in Ukraine is being fought, American defence companies are minting money because the US government is paying them money to make war equipment to replace what is being sent to Ukraine and to provide more equipment and ammunition to Ukraine. Elon Musk is benefiting because he is providing internet communication to Ukraine via his Starlink satellites, and the US government is footing the bill. The media ensures that American citizens are filled with righteous outrage and therefore willing to write a blank check for all things with the word Ukraine on them.
The Power of Corporate-Owned Media
From the foregoing, it should be no surprise that Americans have been completely brainwashed by their so-called “free” media. So much so that, even after it has been proven multiple times that they have been lied to by their media, they still believe whatever they read and see in it. Even after Colin Powell lied in the UN general assembly in 2003, in front of the whole world, that the war against Iraq was necessary to save humanity because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was getting ready to use it against all his neighbors, and even after this lie was completely debunked in the American press itself, Americans still believe very strongly in what they read and see in American media. That is the power of propaganda that was first realized by Joseph Goebbels of Nazi Germany. American governments have learned very well from Herr Goebbels.
The entire US media structure is rotten to the core. Americans cannot trust their media; they cannot trust their lawmakers. Every lawmaker in America is compromised. They are all corrupt and paid by big business. They don’t care, and have never cared, about the American people. They only care about the big business interests who fund their election. But, as stated above, profits are privatized, but risks are socialized. That means that the anger of Islamic people at the US government’s violence against them is borne by the common people of America. It is ordinary people who have to worry about terrorist attacks against them, and who have to endure stringent inspections at airports before boarding a plane, because of the actions of the US government.
As soon as the massive lie of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq was exposed, what did the media machine do? It went about convincing the American people that this was a one-off event, that it was only a few rotten apples that were responsible. American media has done this several times — convinced the people that a major scandal was a one-off event. A notable example is the Iran-Contra affair, in which Ronald Reagan committed two illegal actions simultaneously — he illegally sold weapons to Iran, and he used the money from the arms sales to Iran to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. And yet, the American media spread a fairy tale that this kind of illegal operation was the exception, not the rule.
Similarly, the media went with the lie that it was only President George W. Bush and his cabinet that lied to the people on WMD; that this did not mean that other Presidents, say Barack Obama, would lie to them. This allowed people like Obama to bomb innocent villagers in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for every day of his eight-year tenure as President and lie to the people that only militants were killed because of the use of “precision weapons” and only a small number of innocents died due to “collateral damage.” They know that the American people have no way to check these claims. There is no independent media organization operating in that remote area. The US government learned its lesson from Vietnam, where it allowed journalists to report freely — the result was that the American people, who are fundamentally decent, erupted in mass protests against the Vietnam war. Muhammad Ali refused to enlist in the draft, saying that he had no quarrel with the Vietnamese. Since then, the US military only allows journalists to be “embedded” with US troops — everything they report is first vetted by a military officer and only then allowed to be broadcast. After the lies in the Gulf War of 2003, Americans’ antennae should have been up. They should not have blindly believed the claims of the Obama government about the drone attacks on the Afghan-Pakistani border. But the propaganda and brainwashing by American state-affiliated media are so thorough that, even now, most Americans believe everything their government and media tell them. Which is why the people of America today believe their government’s lies on Ukraine and Israel.
Of course, just because the media tells you something today doesn’t mean they won’t change their message tomorrow. What people need to understand is that the media, in general, has become a tool of the government in molding popular opinion. It does not work in the interests of the common people. Media is owned by giant private companies who help elect the representatives of the people; and so, it works in the interests of those companies. So, if these companies, and hence the government, believe it is time to change the message, media change their tune.
To help American oil companies, American car companies, and the like, the American government, along with American media, helped create the “American Dream” — that everyone should own a spacious private home, along with a two-car garage and a yard. Private car ownership was considered a right. Public transport networks were willfully destroyed in order to facilitate this. The wasteful nature of this lifestyle was downplayed for decades, until the effect of this level of wasteful consumption on rising carbon dioxide levels and climate change was noticed. But, instead of emphasizing a low-consumption lifestyle, which would have the greatest impact on reducing climate change, we are fed the lie that there are magic wands like recycling, like wind and solar technology, that will automatically solve our environmental problems. Solar cars are being pushed recklessly, without a thought about what will happen to the millions of used car batteries that will be thrown into landfills and cause a massive environmental impact.
In every one of these incidents, a problematic solution is first advanced, pushed recklessly by corporate-owned media, and then, when the problems reveal themselves, patchwork solutions are then advanced, using the same co-opted media (who never take responsibility for their role in causing the problems), without consideration of the new problems that the new solutions create. The billionaires and the politicians have total contempt for the people of America, because of how easily they can mold their opinion.
Take, for instance, the war in Ukraine. In 2022, Ukraine and Zelensky could do no wrong. President Zelensky was feted as a hero in the US Congress, and promises were made to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” Today, the US has tired of spending money on Ukraine, because it has realized that its strategic objective of causing a collapse in Russia, resulting in the takeover of Russia by American billionaires, is unlikely to ever happen. And so, the media tune on Ukraine has completely changed. Headlines in American media that were talking about the imminent collapse of Russia are now highlighting the imminent loss of Ukraine. And most people aren’t even questioning this about turn. They don’t realize that the media works for their owners, and the owners have changed their priorities.
Is There Any Hope?
In spite of the all-encompassing propaganda, there are still many decent people in America. Nothing illustrates this than the protests all over America against Israel’s brutal bombing of Gaza. On New Year’s Eve, December 2023, CNN anchors were saying that organizers of the New Year programs in New York City were worried about protests going out of control. They mentioned that hundreds of protests have taken place in the city since the start of the conflict on October 7, 2023, involving tens of thousands of citizens.
But it is highly likely that American political establishment and their corporate sponsors will win this round as well. They will pour another $10 trillion down the drains of West Asia and Ukraine. And impoverish America even further as the big CEOs laugh all the way to the bank. Already the people of the US are in self-extinction mode because more and more young people are delaying marriage or completely giving up on the idea because they can’t afford to start a family, because they are weighed down by college debts that they will have to pay off for the rest of their lives, with few job prospects as more and more jobs are exported, leaving only low-paying service jobs for Americans, which cannot cover the cost of college. People cannot afford to buy homes, and those who have bought homes are getting second mortgages on their homes to pay debts.
Who has the time for family anyway when the media tells you that you need time to fight culture wars, argue about he/she/ze/him/her/them/zim, abortion, race relations, immigration, English vs Spanish, and so many other things that the media makes sure you spend your time thinking about, rather than the far more important questions of how the government uses your money or how you can live a debt-free life or how you can get affordable health care?
And while you are busy fighting each other, the big boys will pack their bags and move to the next country/continent they can squeeze. Once they have bled America and Europe dry, maybe they will move to Asia. And, after that, Africa.
And after that, when they have made this planet a toxic dump, they will ditch this worthless planet and move to the Moon or Mars. That’s why Elon Musk has been so busy building big rockets to take people to Mars. He’s going to need one himself. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said the same thing. Of course, all this will not happen tomorrow. But they are making sure they are ready when the time comes. You have to start early.
