Addict Nation (38 page)

—Judy Kuriansky, Ph.D.,
professional therapist, author, and radio host

It has been said that the history of our country is a history of war. Like a recovering alcoholic telling old war stories about his drinking days, we have turned our shared past into a drunkalog, regaling the next generation with stories of past violence. We called World War I
the war to end all wars
. But it didn’t. We called Vietnam the
televised
war
and predicted watching the gore of it all would inspire us to avoid another one. But it didn’t.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we are the remaining “superpower,” leaving us without a viable enemy. So now we’re fighting the “War on Terror,” an amorphous war that is all around us, all the time. The War on Terror is an endless war. Despite an unnecessary fiasco in Iraq, we still told ourselves that we needed to continue more of the same in Afghanistan, a country that not so long ago confounded and exasperated the Soviet military. The comparisons to the escalations in Vietnam are painfully obvious.

Here’s a Snapshot of Our Addiction to War

It’s the image of President Obama getting a Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, around the very same time he told the nation he was ordering 30,000 more troops into the war zone of Afghanistan.
¹⁵
That’s the reality of our war culture. A president who got elected as an antiwar candidate still can’t resist the siren call of war. Why? Because we, as a culture, are hooked on using war as a solution.

There are those who will dismiss this as a simplistic approach, arguing that war is complex and warning that hasty withdrawals can leave many thousands of innocent civilians dead. But the WikiLeaks release of secret U.S. military documents shows that, during the Iraq war, more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed, 66,000 of them civilians. That was just from 2004 to 2009.
¹⁶
With that many civilians dying while we’re there, it’s hard to argue that we’re saving them by prolonging our stay.

One commonality of addictive behavior is constant rationalization and justification. The president explained that we need to get deeper into the war in order to get out! That kind of sounds like, “I need to have a drink in order to get over a hangover.”

Addiction creates irrational, wishful thinking. The “get-in-deeper-so-I-can-get-out” strategy is a bizarre and unsound justification for war . . . as was the “domino theory” in Vietnam. But our faith in war is so powerful that it also inspires a very sophisticated and aggressive campaign of justification. Troubled actress/addict Lindsay Lohan offered up tortured explanations of why she missed a crucial court date in Los Angeles while caught partying in France (she claimed she lost her passport) and why her alcohol-monitoring bracelet went off (she claimed someone spilled a drink on her leg). This is what addicts do. They insult our intelligence with outlandish stories delivered with a straight face.

And when it comes to crazy rationalizations, nothing beats an internal Pentagon PowerPoint slide outlining America’s war strategy for Afghanistan, which landed on the front page of the
New
York Times
in the spring of 2010, a few months after Obama’s surge announcement. The bizarre and unintentionally hilarious chart immediately went viral.

Death By PowerPoint

Seriously, the Pentagon PowerPoint slide looks like the overactive doodling of a meth head with a pack of crayons. Military officers call the media sessions that go with illustrations like this “very handy” when the goal is not imparting information. Presentations can be so long and convoluted, reporters are left in a daze. A retired marine colonel calls the process “hypnotizing chickens.”
¹⁷

Incomprehensible
Pentagon PowerPoint slide aims to explain U.S. Afghanistan war strategy.

Even the general in charge at that time, Stanley McChrystal, admitted nobody could figure it out. “When we understand that slide we’ll have won the war,” he remarked dryly.
¹⁸

That same general would soon become a source of derision himself, as the infamous “Runaway General,” for offhand remarks he made to a reporter for
Rolling Stone
magazine, which got him fired. General McChrystal and his staff made a slew of derogatory comments about the Obama administration, dismissing President Obama as unprepared for their first meeting and alluding to Vice President Biden as “bite me.”
¹⁹
That just goes to show you that when you are a full-scale war addict, even 30,000 more troops from a president will not satisfy the craving for more. For an addict, no amount of their drug is ever quite enough. This general’s contempt for Obama would seem to stem from his insatiable appetite for war and his intolerance of anybody who might deviate toward a position of moderation, however incrementally. Addicts cannot do moderation. Like we say of drunks, one drink is too many and a thousand isn’t enough. Addicts are also reckless and pride themselves on being renegades, which is precisely how this crew of military honchos came off in this behind-the-scenes magazine profile.

Addicts Also Lie Brilliantly

Addicts are so convincing that they often end up believing their own lies. That’s because addicts lose touch with the very concept of truth. Their notion of “truth” is whatever enables them to get the result they desperately crave. And usually what works fastest is a lie. This explains how addicts can cajole powerful narcotics out of legitimate doctors. It also explains how America’s war-addicted government came up with the faulty information that there were weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, a falsehood that was used to justify our decision to invade a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on America.

In his penetrating book
The American Way of War
, author Eugene Jarecki (who also directed the award-winning film
Why We Fight
) lays out how the government has jerry-rigged a system that can manufacture any intelligence result it seeks by cherry picking data. A former Pentagon insider tells him, “There are thirteen different intelligence agencies . . . You don’t tell ’em what they want to hear, and they will go to other sources . . . In the staff meetings we had in the summer of 2002 . . . it became clear to me that this war was going to happen. An invasion of Iraq, a toppling of Saddam Hussein, was basically the given. It was just a matter of getting the American people up to speed and getting them behind this effort. Any other means by which Iraq could be dealt with were not discussed.”
²⁰

The author explains that, once a case for war is made, the military-industrial complex kicks into high gear, making massive preparations, which in turn increase the gravitational pull toward war, essentially making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does that sound like an addict powerless over the ever-increasing craving to do a drug? It sure does to me. It also reminds us that addiction always leads to moral bankruptcy.

“We know why the people at the top are addicted to war—they profit from it. The bigger question is: why the general public, whose children are being killed and who are going broke financing war, continue to fall for the same fear-mongering parlor trick. Are those people being culturally conditioned to use war for conflict resolution?”

—Blanche DeBeveauville, taxpayer and peace advocate

The-End-Justifies-the-Means Mentality

“The noble lie” elitists use to justify keeping the American public clueless is really not all that different from the crass lie a junkie uses to get his fix. How do the elites get the masses hooked on war? How did they get so many Americans to believe that we had to invade Iraq? Fear. Sobriety is rarely fear based. Addictive behavior almost always is. We were told that we had to take the war to “them” or “they” would take it to us. In truth, what we are really fighting is a state of mind that can crop up anywhere, including Main Street, U.S.A.

On November 5, 2009, my show
Issues
covered the unfolding horror of the worst Muslim-related attack on American soil since 9/11. It did not come from abroad. It was a U.S. Army officer who massacred thirteen Americans and wounded thirty others at our nation’s most populous military base, Fort Hood in Texas.
²¹
U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was a devout Muslim psychiatrist who screamed, “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) before he began aiming his gun at men and women in uniform. The
New York
Times
noted, “Some experts on terrorism say Major Hasan may be the latest example of an increasingly common type of terrorist, one who has been self-radicalized with the help of the Internet and who wreaks havoc without support from overseas networks and without having to cross a border to reach his target.”
²²
Of course he’s a terrorist. And you are not going to wipe out this brand of terrorism by sending U.S. troops into caves half a world away. In fact, it’s believed his upcoming deployment to Afghanistan is what caused this American-born, American-educated lunatic to go over the edge.

It seems every few days there’s a new report of a homegrown terrorist. In December 2009, a British citizen was convicted in England of conspiracy to commit murder for his role in a scheme to blow up several transatlantic passenger jets using liquid explosives in the hopes of killing thousands.
²³
Sounds like he was trying to pull off a repeat of the 9/11 tragedy, which is precisely what sparked all these wars! But twenty-three-year-old Adam Khatib did not come from the hills of Afghanistan. He was raised in England, attending school in East London before getting a factory job there. Prosecutors say he did ultimately get instruction from foreign militants, but it was on a trip to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Internet communication also played a key role in this foiled plot.
²⁴
In a global village, with a World Wide Web, terrorism has no borders or boundaries.

“We made a terrible mistake in even calling this a war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, a way of fighting, the ultimate in Asymmetrical warfare.”

—Charles F. “Chic” Dambach
author of
Exhaust the Limits:
The Life and Times of a Global Peacebuilder

Addiction Creates Wreckage

The drug addict often destroys his family and imperils his friends. Addiction to war creates a particularly horrific brand of wreckage. More than 5,000 brave American soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while the Bush administration often scoffed at the high estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths compiled by activist organizations like Iraq Body Count, it now appears—in light of the WikiLeaks document dump—that the antiwar groups were more on target than our government was willing to admit.
²⁵

Additionally, the United Nations estimates that, in the first four years of the Iraq war, 4 million Iraqis were displaced from their homes. Some fled the country. Others struggled to survive in impoverished Iraqi shanty towns.
²⁶
How’s that for inspiring a resentment against America? What is terrorism, at the end of the day, but a murderous resentment against a more powerful foe and a desire for revenge with religious overtones? Indeed, many theorize that the longer we insist on fighting terrorism with bombs, the more terrorists—homegrown and otherwise—we’ll create out of resentment over the resultant carnage.

“We could have had the whole Muslim world on our side if we had continued to do what we started to do. The rest of the world does not like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda . . . at all! But then you go turn on another Muslim country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9-11? What does that say to the Muslim world? It basically says: We used 9-11 as an excuse to attack Muslims. And that increased terrorism.”

—Charles F. “Chic” Dambach, president
and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding

In recovery, we are taught to respect the nameless, faceless people whom addicts tend to mistreat. We are taught not to yell at the anonymous telephone operator, even though we assume we will never meet that person in the flesh. When we, as a culture, disrespect nameless, faceless people on the other side of the world, using the blanket term
terrorism
to justify attacking them, it often comes back to haunt us in the form of still more terrorism. The United States military is now reportedly dropping bombs on selected targets in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, which is being touted as “the new Afghanistan” because Al-Qaeda is reportedly establishing a foothold in remote provinces there. There are 23 million people in Yemen. If you kill ten alleged terrorists, there are millions right there ready to take their place. You probably need look no further than at the brothers and cousins of the men killed.
²⁷
Considering every person we kill has numerous relatives, the increase of terrorism is likely to be exponential unless we hit bottom on this obsession with bombing enemies.