No thank you for your service

American service, this time in Iraq (Source: here) 

"Thank you for your service!"  is a phrase you hear everywhere in the United States and I absolutely hate it.

Many Americans fall over themselves to thank the men and women in uniform. Airlines extend courtesies to members of the military, such as invitations to board flights early, while retailers put up signs thanking the troops. Veterans are hero-worshipped. In bars and restaurants, soldiers are served ahead of others. People even put little flags up in their front gardens and in their living-room windows to show their respect for members of the armed forces.

I despise these automatic gestures of deference to members of the US military. Automatic deference assumes that American soldiers deserve our respect and our thanks. It is simply taken as given - without a shred of evidence other than the uniform they wear - that they put their lives on the line for us, or for some honourable cause, that they act with honour, and that the wars in which they fight are just.

Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

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(Source: here)

In the table above, I have listed the thirteen wars America fought since the end of the Second World War. Not a single one of these wars took place on American soil. Not a single one of these wars was fought in defence of the territorial integrity of the United States. Only three of the wars were sanctioned by the United Nations. Most of the wars began due to political opportunism or to serve some warped ideology or simply to satisfy a narrow set of commercial interests.

American wars are not the stuff of heroism. It would be more accurate to say that American warfare has been a persistent source of terror in the world. Since 1945, the United States has fought more wars - and longer wars - than any other country. On average, the US has gone to war every six years and each war has lasted on average more than six years. The number of casualties in the thirteen wars runs into the millions of which the vast majority were civilians and, of course, non-Americans. It is surprising only to Americans that the United States is so unpopular around the world.

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But why are Americans war-mongers? There are two closely related explanations for America's unique belligerence. The first is that most ordinary Americans are generally very ignorant about the rest of the world. This can be traced back to their poor education; Americans are rarely taught geography in school nor do they learn much about the histories and cultures of countries other than their own.

I am not just making this up. I completed my entire secondary school education in an American high school. We had plenty of American Government classes and lots of lessons about the Boston Tea Party and the Liberty Bell. But did they teach much about the rest of the world? Nope.

If you still don't believe me then open any one of your favourite social media platforms and search for posts about Americans not knowing where countries are located on a map. Right now, Iran is obviously quite topical, so a survey of 1,995 registered American voters conducted by Morning Consult/Politico from 2020 is currently doing the rounds; it shows that only 23 percent of those asked were able to correctly identify Iran on unlabelled map of the world - the chart below shows where they thought Iran was located.

(Source: here)

Granted, ignorance alone does not start wars. To graduate from being the world's biggest Ignoramus to its Warmonger-in-Chief, you need actors, who can to turn ignorance into warfare. Such actors are found within the unholy trinity of Washington DC officialdom, America's hugely powerful military-industrial complex, and the political leadership in Congress and the White House. Here is how the system works:

First, you instruct a large number of DC-based civil servants in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Department of Defence to spend all their time analysing global political dynamics and concocting all kinds of conflict scenarios for when the time is right to go to war. By the way, war-loving, free-thinking types can have great careers in these institutions, because unlike civil servants in domestically-oriented government departments these guys have way more freedom to scheme and face far less accountability, because the American public is so ignorant about what goes on outside the United States.

Next, you make sure the DC officials work closely with a bunch of giant companies from the military-industrial complex to ensure the flow of arms to the US military runs like clock work, because once a war gets underway the guns and the ammo get used up really quickly. The US arms business is enormous. Defence companies are the really big pecuniary beneficiaries of foreign wars. Right now, US defence contractors rake in about a billion Dollars a day supplying the ammo that the US military uses to blow up the Iranian armed forces, Iran’s civilian infrastructure, and, of course, innocent Iranian school girls.

American tax payers are footing the bill.

While wars are particularly profitable, defence companies also make lots of money in peace time, because the US government spends a whopping trillion Dollars a year to make sure its huge standing military is always in a state of perfect combat readiness. To put that figure into context, a trillion Dollars is equivalent to the total combined military spending of the next ten largest militaries in the world, including China, Russia, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and others (see chart below).

 (Source: here)

The final ingredients that goes into making an American war are Congress and the White House. DC officials and the big chiefs in the military-industrial complex do not get to drop bombs and make really big money without the direct involvement of America's elected representatives, whose job it is to sell war to the American people.

Which they do with aplomb, because they are paid so spectacularly well to do so. According to a 2025 analysis, 98% of US lawmakers receive campaign funding from the arms industry. Moreover, defence-related Political Action Committees contribute more than USD 135 million to members serving on key Congressional committees tasked with overseeing defence firms. At least 50 lawmakers are known to be directly invested in companies that manufacture military weapons and equipment, and nearly one-third of the members of the Senate's Defence Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee own stocks in defence contractors.

No wonder members of Congress care more about defence companies than the American public and that they are so easily swayed in favour of war. Over the years, they have naturally become rather proficient in selling war to the public, although in fairness it is not so difficult. When you happen to represent a voting public, which literally knows zilch about anything east of Maine and west of Washington State then it doesn’t take a genius to turn some unfortunate foreign leader into a bogeyman. Which is usually all it takes to get a good war going.

Bear in mind also that Americans do not have the same instinctual aversion to war as, say, Europeans do. Americans have not experienced war on their own turf since the Civil War of 1861-1865. This makes Americans rather unique; most Europeans, Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and especially Middle Easterners have recent, profound, and deep traumas from war, not least because the US has waged so many wars in their neighbourhoods.

Personally, I can only speak as a European. We are by no means the worst afflicted by American wars, but Europe has nevertheless experienced two world wars on its soil. Like many other Europeans, my own parents, who are both still alive, were born under Nazi occupation. Think about that for a second. No American can make such a claim. No American really knows how awful war in your own country can be. Americans watch Hollywood movies to get an understanding of war. Unfortunately, Hollywood glorifies war, presenting it in neat little stories with happy endings and opportunities for men to be brave and for women to make heroic sacrifices. Reality is not quite that simple.

You might wonder why public ignorance, a supportive DC civil service, the military-industrial complex, and Congress & the White House produce wars roughly every six years? It is not actually a coincidence. The reason wars happen at this interval is that the US political business cycle produces dips in the approval rating of presidents every six years, that is, after they have expended most of their political capital on passing their flagship pieces of domestic legislation in their first term. Their only means of beefing up their approval rating in the second term is therefore to turn to foreign policy. When they do, it is obviously extremely convenient that they have at their disposal a very large and combat-ready standing military of professional soldiers.

Trump's war with Iran illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Trump is in his second term and his approval rating is declining. Trump was not provoked by Iran to go to war. There was no Iranian trigger. Trump chose to go to war with Iran, without a plan, in one of the most volatile parts of the world. He did so for one reason only, namely to deflect the media's attention away his horrific record as a child rapist in a crucial election year.

Thousands of Iranians are now dying and the global economy could yet crash as a result of the disruption to oil shipments going through the Hormuz Strait. Trump does not care; he is doing this for himself. It is strictly personal business.  

Unfortunately, Trump's Iran adventure is by no means the only example of an American war without grounding in US national interest. Who can forget George W. Bush's wars against Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? By now, everyone knows that the 9/11 attacks were planned and carried out by Saudis, not Iraqis or Afghans. Yet Bush, in his infinite wisdom, pitted the might of the entire US military against two countries, which had nothing to do with 9/11! The wars were cleverly orchestrated by Vice-President Dick Cheney. The Iraq war in particular was done with the specific objective of helping US oil companies to make a lot of money. And defence contractors too, of course. When the dust finally settled some twenty years later, the two wars had cost the lives of more than 4.5 million people, including at least half a million completely innocent civilians.

So please forgive me if I don’t thank members of the US armed forces for their services. American wars are not honourable wars and the people who fight in them are not honourable people. Worse, US soldiers are professionals, not draftees, so they have actually chosen to do what they do. They deliberately opted to devote their lives to inflicting death and suffering on the rest of the world - on a scale without precedent in modern human history. Most of their victims are civilians. Most of the combatants they fight are simple, ordinary people, often very poor and almost always badly equipped. In fighting the United States, they are up against an outsized and highly sophisticated aggressor. They defend their country, their families, and their freedom, usually against terrible odds. If there any heroes in this story, it is them.

American soldiers are not the heroes. They are the murderers. They never fight to defend the United States, because the United States is never really under threat. Instead, they fight in the service of corrupt politicians out to boost their flagging approval ratings or to line the pockets of CEOs of large US defence and energy companies. Right now, in Iran, American soldiers are committing mass murder in yet another illegal war to cover the tracks of a corrupt, deranged, paedophile war-monger.

So don't tell me to respect American soldiers! To me, they are stupid at best. At worst, they are cowardly, brainwashed, and too morally bankrupt to do anything other than bleat “Yes Sir!" in responce to every order they are given.

For once, I am proud and delighted that Europe has taken a principled stance against Trump's illegal war in Iran. Spain has shown particular leadership, but, perhaps, the biggest surprise has been Lapdog Britain, which somehow found the courage to refuse to yap along with Trump's offensive operations in Iran. For now, at least.

By way of conclusion, let me make a simple point. America's long history of unjust wars demonstrates the danger inherent in having a large permanently combat-ready standing military of professional soldiers. When you have a big hammer then everything soon starts to look like a nail. The US military is literally begging to be used and it is usually some deranged war-monger politician who gets to do so. America's incredibly gullible soldiers are mere tools.

If we wish to reduce the incidence of unjust wars, it would be sensible to start by having much smaller militaries with stronger defensive capabilities and to focus on defensive alliances. It would also be a good idea to revert to the draft rather than using professional armies, because draftees are far less likely to go into the dark night of war for frivolous reasons.

The End