Greta Zarro - Antiwar.com Blog

Reprinted from World Beyond War.

The United States of America, unlike any other nation on Earth, maintains a massive network of foreign military bases around the world, more than 900 bases in more than 90 countries and territories. If the peace movement is serious about ending the United States’ and its allies’ warmaking, then this global constellation of bases must be curtailed.

The permanent stationing of more than 220,000 U.S. troops, weapons arsenals, and thousands of aircraft, tanks, and ships in every corner of the globe makes the logistics for U.S. aggression, and that of its allies, quicker and more efficient. Bases also facilitate the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with the United States keeping nuclear bombs in five NATO member countries, and nuclear-capable planes, ships, and missile launchers in many others. Because the U.S. is continually creating plans for military actions around the world, and because the U.S. military always has some troops “on the ready,” the initiation of combat operations is simpler.

Continue reading “The Biggest Military Base Empire on Earth”

Just one month into a new decade, we face an ever-increasing risk of nuclear apocalypse. The U.S. government’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani on January 3 intensified the very real threat of another all-out war in the Middle East. On January 23, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists accordingly reset the Doomsday Clock to just 100 short seconds to midnight, apocalypse.

We are told that war is good to protect us from the "terrorists" but the return on the US taxpayers’ $1 trillion a year investment in "defense spending" was slim to none from 2001-2014, when terrorism peaked. According to the Global Terrorism Index, terrorism actually increased during the so-called "war on terror," at least up until 2014, finally slowing now in numbers of deaths but actually increasing in terms of numbers of countries suffering terror attacks. Countless journalists, federal intelligence analysts, and former military officials have suggested that US military interventions, including the drone program, may actually cause an increase in terrorist strength and activity, generating more violence than they prevent. Researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have demonstrated statistically that, from 1900 to 2006, nonviolent resistance was twice as successful as armed resistance and resulted in more stable democracies with less chance of reverting to civil and international violence. War does not make us more safe; we are impoverishing ourselves by hemorrhaging taxpayer dollars on faraway wars that traumatize, wound, and kill our loved ones, along with millions of unnamed victims abroad.

Continue reading “Fouling Our Own Nest and Draining Our Wallets: It’s Time To Divest From Endless Wars”