Expensive war helps create economic wreckage

Macho swagger. That’s what got us where we are: so deep in an economic hole that at high noon we can look up and see stars. Our ruinous state of economic affairs is due to our chronically misguided machismo, the thing that causes us to fancy ourselves as so tough that we do not need allies, or that all we need to do is to put the world on notice about whatever we want. Two hundred other nations are then expected to fall into line. Ah, the burdens of super-powerdom.

Leaders of government of both parties in Washington, many without military experience,chose to prosecute yet another war as a show of American force. It was ill advised and in fact saw the unprecedented mission of Cardinal Pio Laghi, former Apostolic Nuncio of the Vatican, to dissuade our leaders from punishing one Islamic foe for the sins of another. A year and a half after the horrific attack on the U.S., we had been unsuccessful in finding and capturing Osama bin Laden, and strategy chiefs feared the nation would look impotent if we took no action further than to continue bombing Afghan mountain strongholds. To them it seemed inconsequential that our intelligence agencies had known for 10 years that bin Laden and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein were implacable enemies.

Professional military brass advised that mere aerial bombing against Iraq, the known wrong enemy notwithstanding, would produce little result. Enough boots on the ground for a sustained occupation would deliver the military objective. But top defense officials, including those innocent of any military experience, overruled their generals, with the naïve idea that the massive and in fact fiendishly ingenious bombs we had in our arsenal would make it a walk-off contest.   

It seems that some of these male government officials became intoxicated with the theoretical power of mechanical weapons, and they wanted to field-test them. What did it matter that the Pentagon professionals themselves, whose patriotism and virility were beyond question, counseled against it? Armchair warriors, like little boys with war toys on Christmas, knew better.

America’s shabbiest war — begun by the last administration and continuing under the present one — has sacrificed 5,000 U.S. military and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians on the altar of misguided machismo. Millions of Iraqis are displaced outside their country, and those remaining want us to leave. Our tens of thousands of amputees and PTSD victims fill our poorly administered veterans’ hospitals, and of course we cavalierly spend $2.5 billion each week after all these years of failed war without any war tax or other means of paying the bill.

Which makes me conclude: Of course we are in economic wreckage. Of course we are in the worst slump since the Great Depression. Of course we are broke. When we indulge our ruinous machismo, it costs a lot of money. So the few zealous militants remaining who expect some excuse of a victory in Iraq — the nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 since none of the hijackers was Iraqi,something we knew a week after the attack — might want to apologize and bring our troops home before one more casualty. But then, it would be unmanly to apologize, wouldn’t it, even when we are wrong?

I blame machismo, the sad pretense at masculinity of old men pushing young ones into harm’s way with the sacrilegious justification of patriotism. “The Unit” and “24” promote the manliness cult, funded by fully 60 percent of the discretionary federal budget every year since World War II. It is blessed by clergymen with U.S. flags in their sanctuaries and with sermon content indistinguishable from government propaganda. Catholic pundits, back at the start of Iraq, even misquoted Pope John Paul to say that citizens should defer to government officials in such technical things as declaring war. You’d think Vietnam had taught us something.

A man is a man if he can walk away from a fight, not if he can start one with a sucker punch. And real men, like John Paul, know how to apologize when wrong.