/Published on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 by the Metro Times
<http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7302> (Detroit,
Michigan) /
*Why We Must Lose This War *
*by Jack Lessenberry*
Gwynne Dyer isn’t exactly a wimp. Not many guys from Newfoundland are.
Born during World War II, he has been fascinated by things military all
his life, and has served in three navies — ours, Canada’s and Great
Britain’s. He has university degrees from all three countries too, and a
Ph.D. in military and Middle Eastern history. During the 1980s, he
produced and narrated the best documentary series about the nature of
war that I’ve ever seen.
And here’s what he says about what we are doing:
"The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible.
Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the
war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the
next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it
wrong.”
Those are the opening lines of his latest and perhaps most important
book, /Future Tense: The Coming World Order/
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0771029780/commondreams-20/ref=nosim>
(paperback, McClelland and Stewart, $12.95). If you plan on reading only
one book this year, make this the one. In perfectly clear prose, with
arguments as well-researched as they are compelling, this military
expert explains why what we’re doing is mad.
He explains how we haven’t grasped that the world has changed, that we
aren’t living in our old superpower world anymore, one in which we’re
the leader of the forces of light against the evil dark powers of
communism. Nor are we, in fact, even a military superpower in the way we
like to think we are; in reality, our military machine can only be used
against very weak countries. As he notes, “War with a serious opponent
would lead to a level of American casualties that the U.S. public would
not tolerate for long.”
What the world needs most in the long run (if there’s to be a long run),
he reminds us, is a stable international order in which all nations
gradually work on abandoning war as an acceptable way of settling any
differences. Dyer isn’t starry-eyed about this; he thinks it will take a
hundred years at least to get major countries to stop resorting to war,
“for it is trying to change international habits that had at least 5,000
years to take root.”
That, he reminds us, is the whole purpose of the United Nations, which
we played the major role in starting exactly 60 years ago this spring.
Yes, we’ve resorted to war before, as have other countries, but we
always at least pretended that what we were doing was legally justified
by international standards.
Now, however, the current administration is essentially spitting on
this, and openly proclaiming our right to intervene unilaterally
anywhere we want. Why is that so bad? Because others will do it too,
and, eventually, it will break down even the ideal of an international
order, causing a general return to “the old world of alliances, arms
races and all the other old baggage.”
Dyer writes, “No other major power wants to abandon the project to
outlaw war … but if the world’s greatest power becomes a rogue state,
they won’t have much choice.” Some days, it appears we’ve already
crossed the line.
Interestingly, if that happens, we may not be able to afford to be a
rogue state for very long. In what’s surely the most telling and
terrifying part of this book, the author takes on the most frightening
topic of all — the real condition of the American economy, which is now
totally dependent on foreign investment.
You’d scarcely know it from the “mainstream media,” but we’re now the
biggest debtor nation in history, owing far more to foreign countries
than they do to us, and running up $500 billion more on our “credit
card” every year.
Why does this go on? Dyer argues what other economists have told me in
whispers: “The U.S. economy is a confidence trick based on everybody
else’s perception that the United States is centrally important for the
world’s security and that its economy is centrally important for the
world economy.”
That was absolutely true in 1945, and largely true even in 1985. But not
anymore. If you look at only those foreign investments that could be
liquidated fairly quickly, the total, he estimates, would come to about
$8 trillion. If those investments started to move elsewhere, the value
of the dollar could be cut in half, Dyer estimates, overnight.
That would mean not only no more Lincoln Navigators, it more than likely
would lead to the end of democracy as we know it. Which would be
especially unfortunate since, as he notes, “global warming and other
environmental problems are going to hit us very hard over the next 50
years.”
“How fast they hit and how great the resulting upheavals will be cannot
be known in advance, but very few people apart from the usual suspects
in the United States any longer doubt that climate change is a reality.”
Incidentally, if you’re tempted to tell me why Gwynne Dyer is all wrong,
I’ll be willing to listen — but not if you haven’t read this book first.
© 2005 MetroTimes, Inc.
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