Forty years ago,
Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “A time comes when silence is
betrayal. And that time has come for us in relation to
Vietnam.”
King’s opposition to the war in
Asia was immediately denounced as “demagogic slander” by Time
magazine. But others also spoke out. George W. Ball, undersecretary
of State, told President Lyndon Johnson that he thought the war
would tear America apart, persist for years, and end with us
losing. The war did continue for another decade after his
prediction, along with plenty of progress reports. Eleven years and
two presidents later, 58,209 Americans had died, as well as an
estimated 3 million Vietnamese.
American power and
influence were eroded. Constitutional principles were violated, and
thousands of returning soldiers were not adequately cared for.
Today, there are eerie parallels to that era. Kurt Campbell,
cofounder of the Center for a New American Security, points some of
them out in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Reprinting a
1967 declassified CIA memo on how we lost the war in Vietnam, he
simply replaced the word “Vietnam” with
“Iraq,” and the word “Soviets” with
“Iranians,” to reveal our current assumptions.
For apparently, there is no exit plan for our war in
Iraq. Serious military analysts say the current strategy in Iraq
will take at least 10 years and may not work. The cost is
unsustainable, yet no politician is telling the American people how
to address the risks, unintended consequences or costs of this war.
Part of the problem is that we have no idea what the war costs.
Robert Higgs, senior fellow in political economy for The
Independent Institute, calculates that the government is currently
spending approximately $1 trillion per year for all defense-related
purposes. Most people think we are spending less than 4 percent of
our gross national product on defense. This is an underestimate:
The defense budget leaves out the budget for homeland security,
which spends $46 billion a year and employs more than 153,000
people. Nor does the defense budget include care of veterans. Our
national security spending is closer to 8 percent of GDP, and
nearly 50 percent of the federal workforce is involved in providing
for the common defense. Further compounding the problem is our
government’s refusal to increase taxes to pay for the war.
Instead, we send the bill to future generations and watch the oil
kingdoms and Chinese make money by buying our debt.
This
is also the first administration to refuse to raise taxes to pay
for a war. I’m a historian, so I read arcane works: Carolyn
Webber and Aaron Wildavsky remind us in their book, The History of
Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World, that feudalism in
the Middle Ages was defined in part by exempting the nobility from
taxation, while taxing poor peasants and small merchants. When this
administration cut taxes in time of war, the primary beneficiary
was the top 1 percent that now takes in an astounding 16 percent of
national income — up from 8 percent in 1980.
And what
about those brave young men and women that we put in harm’s
way? In a forum for veterans in San Antonio this August, California
Rep. Bob Filner, D, who chairs the House Committee on Veterans’
Affairs, pointed out the ratio of injured to killed in today’s wars
is a staggering 17-to-1. In Vietnam, it was 3-to-1. That tells us
we must plan on providing quality services to the many maimed men
and women who survive this war.
But since change in
policy is not coming from the top down, it is being spurred from
below. Nearly 300 cities, including Seattle, Wash., Butte, Mont.,
and Corvallis, Ore., have passed resolutions urging the
administration to bring our troops home. The U.S. Conference of
Mayors endorsed a resolution this June that called “for the
administration to begin planning immediately for the swift and
prudent redeployment of the U.S. Armed Forces.” The mayors
added that the war was “reducing federal funds available for
needed domestic investments in education, healthcare, public
safety, homeland security and more.”
What other
Western communities will break the silence? And will that change
anything? Nobody knows. But we can take heart in Margaret
Mead’s advice: “A small group of thoughtful people
could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever
has.”
James Callard is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
is a retired Air Force colonel who taught national security policy
at the National War College in Washington, D.C. He now teaches at
two colleges in Colorado and lives in
Durango.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
