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 invited to be 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 America's 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 narrow set of commercial interests.

American wars are not the stuff of heroism. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that American warfare has been a persistent source of terror. Since 1945, the United States has fought more wars - and longer wars - than any other country. On average, the United States has been at war every six years and each war has lasted more than six years on average. 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 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, which can be traced back to poor education; Americans are not taught geography in school nor do they learn much about the histories of countries other than their own.

I am not just making this up. I completed my secondary schooling in an American high school, where there were 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 of your favourite social media platforms and search for posts of Americans not knowing where countries are located on a map. Right now, Iran is obviously topical, so a survey by Morning Consult/Politico from 2020 of 1,995 registered American voters is doing the rounds; it shows that only 23 percent of those asked were able to correctly identify Iran on unlabelled map of the world.

Granted, ignorance alone does not start wars. To graduate from the world's biggest Ignoramus to its Warmonger-in-Chief, you need actors, who can to turn ignorance into the business of war. Those 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 it 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, these are great jobs for war-loving, free-thinking types, because unlike civil servants in domestically-oriented government departments these guys have way more freedom to scheme and they face far less accountability, because the American public is so ignorant about what goes on outside the United States.

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

American tax payers are footing the bill.

While wars are especially profitable for the defence companies, they also make lots of money during 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 a trillion Dollars into context, this figure is equivalent to the total combined military spending of the ten next-largest militaries in the world, including Russia, China, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and others (see chart below).

 (Source: here)

The final ingredient in the formula for American wars is Congress and the White House. Neither DC officials nor the big chiefs in the military-industrial complex get to blow up bombs and make money without the direct involvement of America's elected representatives, whose job it is to sell war to the American public.

Which they do with aplomb, because they are so spectacularly well paid 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 (PACs) 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 then that members of Congress care more about the needs of defence companies than the needs of 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 wars to the public, although this is not all that hard in the US. When you 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.

Besides, Americans do not have the same instinctual aversion to war as, say, Europeans, because Americans have not experienced war on their own turf since the Civil War of 1861-1865 (barring the brief Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December, 1941). This fact is rather unique to the US; 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 speak as a European. We are by no means the region 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 alive were born under Nazi occupation. Think about that for a second. No Americans can make such a claim. No Americans really know how awful war in your own country is. Americans can only resort to Hollywood movies for knowledge about war, but movies tend to glorify 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.

Why does this mix of public ignorance, a supportive DC civil service, the military-industrial complex, and Congress & the White House produce wars roughly every six years?

The reason is that the US political business cycle tends to produce dips in the approval ratings of presidents after they have expended political capital on passing flagship pieces of domestic legislation in their first term, so the only remaining means of shoring up the approval ratings is to turn to foreign policy. At such times, it is obviously extremely handy to have at hand a very large and combat-ready standing military of professional soldiers. If all you have is a hammer then everything soon starts to look like a nail.

Trump's war with Iran illustrates this point exactly. Trump was not provoked to go to war with Iran. There was no trigger. Trump chose to go to war with Iran, without a plan in one of the most sensitive part of the world. And he did it 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 due to the disruption to oil shipments 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 armed forces against two countries, which literally 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. US soldiers are professionals, not draftees, so they have actually chosen to do what they do. They have 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. They take up arms against an outsized aggressor in defence of their country and their freedom, usually against terrible odds.

If there any heroes in this story, it is they. American soldiers are definitely not the heroes. They are the murderers. They inflict untold suffering, not in the defence of the United States, which is never really under threat, but in the service of a corrupt politicians out to boost his flagging approval rating 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 Anerican soldiers! To me, they are stupid, too cowardly, too brainwashed, too morally bankrupt to do anything other than bleat “Yes Sir!" to every order.

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

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. Such a force is literally begging to be used and it is usually some deranged war-monger politicians who gets to do so. America's incredibly gullible soldiers are just tools. In order to reduce the incidence of unjust wars, it would be senseible to have much smaller militaries with strong focus on defensive alliances. It would also be a good idea to return to using the draft rather than professional armies, because draftees are far less likely to go into the dark night of war for reasons of mere frivolity.

The End