War on Wars

Published in the Oregonian: Thursday, July 15, 2010, 8:00 AM    

Guest Columnist

By Charlie Phillips

I get tired of listening to pundits and politicians talk about the "war on drugs," the "war on terrorism."
How exactly do you wage war on a brick of cocaine?
It's ridiculous, as is large-scale military action to fight terrorism. Terrorism is a methodology, and those who enact it -- terrorists -- are everywhere. It only takes a single person, as we've seen. How can you wage war on that?
Drug abuse is a people problem, not a drug problem, and it will only be fixed when the reasons behind the demand for drugs are resolved. And terrorism and drug abuse are both the result – at least in part – of an isolating, dehumanizing world, made worse by poor policy decisions.
So what do we do?
For one, we stop grandstanding and we start dealing in reality and address the root causes that contribute to these problems. We can then develop strategies to fix those causes. And to pay for it we divert monies we currently spend waging "war" on bricks of cocaine and entire countries and instead spend it on fixing the real problems.
The total defense spending for this year will be between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion. If you count one dollar a second, 24 hours a day, it would take you 32,000 years to just count that much money. The 2009 U.S. military budget was nearly as much as the rest of the world's defense spending combined – nearly as much as the entire rest of the world's defense spending combined – and is over nine times larger than the military budget of China.
If we diverted one-tenth of what we spend on our military to our schools and social programs, we could give our children more opportunity and a fair start in life that would go a long way to curtailing drug abuse. If we did that worldwide, we'd go a long way to solving terrorism. If we spent the money we spend waging unnecessary war and instead spent it on programs designed to stimulate economic growth and opportunity for the average person on the street – worldwide – we'd be perceived as less a target of rage and more the shining light we hold ourselves up to be.
Waste, fraud, power struggles and greed in the military-industrial complex suck billions of dollars away from our youth, our security, our infrastructure, our future. It greatly adds to the suffering and anguish of billions of people worldwide, and it does not make us safer – quite the contrary.
It's time to address our problems from a reality base and not from one of grandstanding and disingenuous nonsense. It's time to seriously scrutinize the military-industrial complex, address its waste, fraud and abuses, assess our true defense needs and then redirect unneeded funds to programs that will truly bring us security and lasting peace.