General Butler knew firsthand, and wrote about it, that the men and women of our armed forces pay the highest price for the war racket. They were induced to enter military service to defend the country. They weren't told that they would be used as cannon fodder in the overseas interventionist war racket. They have paid, and still pay, the price with their lives ), their physical and psychological injuries, and their homelessness, suicides, economic losses and broken families. The number of veterans needing health care services is expected to soar past 100,000.
The US has suffered 4,000 deaths in Iraq and another 500 in Afghanistan. Our wounded cannot be so precisely counted as they fall into various categories.
One of the most striking wounds is a direct result of the nature of guerrilla warfare — concussions. Concussions were not even noted until after 2003. Now it is believed that about 1 in 10 US soldiers and Marines — that is roughly 50,000 men and women — has been affected. The loss of limbs should be easier to count, but the figures are in dispute. A minimum is about 8,000. Most of these people will recover, but many of them will spend their lives in wheel chairs.
One in four of the soldiers and Marines — that is between 125 and nearly 200 thousand -- has an illness we did not even know existed until 1980. It is PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. And the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that 1 in 3 of the men and women who served in Iraq — perhaps 200 thousand needs mental health treatment. Some of these need help because they are either suicidal or could endanger others. The most complicated and frightening “wound,”however, is result of the use of depleted uranium bombs and artillery shells. It is inevitable that we face thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of cases of cancer as a result of the use of this weapon.
Soldiers' remains are sneaked into the country or are shipped as freight while the body of an ex-President who was condemned by the World Court and the United Nations for his brutal undeclared war against Nicaragua lies in state with flags at half-mast for a month. In Iraq, funds diverted to fat-cat contractors are resulting in reduced veterans' benefits. Wounded soldiers, some with serious head wounds and amputations, are sneaked into the country at night . Readjustment is particularly hard for National Guard returnees, and there's a war on veterans. We'll lose a lot of them. Kathy Dobie has written about how a stressed-out Marine Corps sends its troops on repeated tours in Iraq -- then tosses them out when they come back traumitized. Lance Corporal James Jenkins is one such casualty of a profitable war that destroys lives.
Smedley Butler said: "The bankers collected their profits, but the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veterans' hospitals in the United States."
Not much is heard in our corporate media of the foreign casualties of the war racket, but the mass murder we have brought to Iraq may have killed (there are no reliable statistics) as many as half a million Iraqis. Didn't the innocents killed and maimed in car bombings, hospital raids and Fallujah free-fire zones have a right to life?
American civilians in this national security state pay a price too. Propaganda which is meaningful to some is insulting to others, dividing us as a people. The "War on Terror," another racket, is carefully designed to keep us docile and emotionally afraid of various bogeymen who otherwise would have little or no effect whatsoever on our daily lives. A UN report states that there are only 429 members of al Qaeda in the entire world, although our military aggression is helping them.
We suffer internationally with our illegal invasions, by undiplomatically alienating our allies and by promoting the recruitment of terrorists with wanton killing and torture.
Meawhile we're mis-using our dedicated young people to prop up the world's foremost narco-state in Afghanistan and a Soviet-style dictator in Uzbekistan.
The economy is a casualty of war. Resources which could be used to improve our standard of living (we are now 11th in the world), upgrade our education (we are 46th in literacy), provide full medical care to our people (every other developed country has it), enhance our physical and natural resources and help us prepare for the results of global warming and fossil fuel depletion. Our economy is on thin ice, and the economic debt we are creating means that every American baby owes $27,434 at the time of birth, most of it to Chinese and Japanese babies. No wonder babies cry!
Poverty has risen an amazing 17 per cent under George W. Bush; an African-American baby born within a mile of the White House has less chance of surviving its first year than an urban baby in India; the United States is now ranked 43rd in the world in infant mortality, 84th for measles immunisation and 89th for polio; the world's richest oil company, ExxonMobil, will net 30 billion dollars in profits this year, having received a huge slice of the 14.5 billion dollars in "tax breaks" which Bush's new energy bill guarantees his elite cronies. In his two elections, Bush has received most of his "corporate contributions" - the euphemism for bribes totalling 61.5 million dollars - from oil and gas companies.
Smedley Butler said: "The general public shoulders the bill. And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations."
The net result of the war racket is that we are a lied to, uninformed, indebted, unhealthy, culturally poor, destructive, disliked, terrorist-promoting, frightened people in a military-based Imperial America which is too similar to the one that our founding fathers sought independence from. Empire abroad means empire at home.
Is this what we want?