Back in Civil War days the infantry troops cheered their military commanders by shouting “Huzzah!” as they rode by. More recently folks gave “Three Cheers for So-and-So!” for a deed well done. I don’t know what millenials do today to cheer deeds well done – if they do at all. Today is a day for shouting HUZZAAH and THREE CHEERS for President Trump for declaring in a Wednesday tweet U.S. ‘never should have sent troops to the Middle East’. “Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA should never have been in Middle East. Moved our 50 soldiers out. Turkey MUST take over captured ISIS fighters that Europe refused to have returned. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending!” (OANN Newsroom, 11AM , Wednesday, October 9, 2019) The Kurds, by the way, have been bandits their entire history.
OMG! I never thought I’d live to see a President of the United States buck the Omnipotent Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC)! President Trump is the third President of the United States to do so since President Dwight D. Eisenhower (ironically former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces in WW II) warned us of the growing power and influence of the unholy, incestuous, and fraud-ridden Pentagon-Defense Contractor-Congress Cartel. In his January 17, 1961 farewell speech Eisenhower said:
“….We annually spend on military “security” more than the net income of all United States corporations. ….In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence …by the military-industrial-complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties and democratic processes. … Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Truman actually made Congress pay for the Korean War up front.
From the moment Eisenhower walked out of the White House the MIC moved in and conducted their coup of America’s foreign policy beginning with Vietnam. Since then America’s foreign policy has been dictated not by legitimate national security interests but by money, money, MONEY! Nothing symbolized the MIC more than the photo of President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara kneeling on the floor of the Oval Office picking targets in Vietnam for the military – limited targets that did not include bombing the dams that protected Hanoi and would have ended the war. President George H.W. Bush, Sr. (#41), a Texas oil millionaire, was the first to publicly acknowledge the establishment of “A New World Order” in which America was going to be the world’s policeman (but only where the oil was) in a speech to the United Nations. We (the military) were prevented from executing a perfectly planned invasion of Cuba to remove communist Castro from Cuba (Dagger in the Heart by Mario Lazo), winning Korea and Vietnam, and killing bin Laden (without invading) not by our enemies but by our own presidents, politicians and state department.
Anyone who reads the scriptures knows the Lord only blesses this nation when we fight battles He approves – and those are almost always defensive. Those are the only kind of battles the Lord will fight for us or Israel. Occupying foreign nations for ten or twenty years on the pretext of “exporting democracy” is neither defensive nor moral. President Bush, Junior (the Yale cheerleader) told a former Latin American president at an Organization of American States conference “War is an excellent way to improve the economy!” In 1939 Winston Churchill said “The government had a choice between shame and war. They chose shame and they’ll get war.” While the British government refused to accept the reality of Hitler’s agenda, America’s military-industrial-complex has fabricated “reality” in order to profit off endless, winless wars. The old adage “War is business and business is good” is the most wicked philosophy on this earth (next to abortion – which war is a form of). And yet Bush, Jr. bragged about it. He didn’t feel compelled to ask his father’s advice before sending our best to Afghanistan AND Iraq for seventeen years and counting. Bush, Sr. didn’t invade Iraq “because I knew it was a bitterly divided country.”
No other than our first president George Washington warned us of entangling alliances in his farewell speech. Americans would be hard pressed to count the number of presidents who based their decisions on the general welfare of us citizens versus the pervasive influence of lobbyists and foreign contributions. Of course, “us citizens” keep voting the criminals and moral bankrupt reprobates back into office because the average voter is so susceptible to media influence and $elf intere$t.
The last president to buck the Military-Industrial-Complex was John F. Kennedy. In 1987 I had the opportunity to speak to the author of American Guerrilla, Roger Hilsman, whose fascinating experience during WW II and PhD in International Relations from Harvard gained him the position of Southeast Asian adviser to President John F. Kennedy. Dr. Hilsman advised President Kennedy “we have no business in Vietnam.” President Kennedy said, “Roger, I think you’re right. I’m withdrawing the troops.” President Kennedy was assassinated a few days later. (Hilsman testimony is in the Library of Congress and in the Congressional Record)
President Trump has been a threat the Military-Industrial-Complex since the day he was elected. That’s why John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Martha McSally, et al oppose(d) him at every step. It’s an axiom in the military that “No good deed goes unpunished.” Let’s see if President Trump’s fate is different than JFK’s.
