http://politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8505/1/367/Book Review: American Wars: Illusions & Realities

American Wars: Illusions & Realities

Edited by Paul BuchheitPaperback: 192 pagesClarity Press, 2008.

In this slender, but thought-provoking book, Paul Buchheit, professor at Chicago Colleges, founder of fightingpoverty.org and co-founder of Global Initiative Chicago, packs a wallop in presenting the glorifiedillusions of war, juxtaposing them with the realities and horrors of military force and occupation.Divided into six sections that each examine a highly regarded human value (Honor, Truthfulness, Self-Awareness, Compassion, Altruism, Realism) every essay is presented with a specific and distorted illusion – typically advocated by hawks in government and big business – followed by a statement reflecting thetrue nature of war. Professor Buchheit and a distinguished group of writers, which include academicscholars, veterans, and experienced researchers, and who have been in the forefront of the human rights and peace movements, challenge the conventional rhetoric of warfare and our forced attempts to democratizethe world.In the first essay, Buchheit introduces a brief, yet thorough, historical overview of American wars and theUnited States long history of occupying other people’s territories. The prevailing belief from proponents of military intervention, writes Buchheit, “[is] the spread of American morals and culture will eventually bring prosperous wealth to everyone.”For the nuts and bolts of a military society, Buchheit breaks it all down to dollars and cents. No matter whatwe’re told, the US is in fact a military-oriented society that spends obscene amounts of money building itsstockpiles of weapons and staffing its bases across the globe. The US is “responsible for almost half of theworld’s total military expenditures, which surpassed $1.1 trillion in 2005.” And while we allocate a lot of money to the defense budget, we also profit from war. Buchheit cites a study by Executive Excess 2006,“34 publicly traded US defense contractors and found that average annual CEO pay doubled from $3.6million to $7.2 million since the War on Terror started.” Stock prices for these companies increased 50 percent between 2000 and 2005.In spite of his informative overview of war and the US’s role, Buchheit concludes his essay weakly andabruptly by questioning how we can achieve peace and democracy in world threatened by terrorism. Heturns to foreign policy experts who agree that our priority in the war of terrorism should be on the reductionof oil dependency – a pat and easy answer to a complex question.In the “Self Awareness” or “We Understand How War Affects Us” section, the most hard-hitting essay inthe collection is the one that deals with the economic impact of war on the general public. The illusion thatwar boosts the American economy is based on how World War II jumpstarted it as jobs in industry werecreated, propelling the US out the Great Depression. Dr. Jesu Estrada, professor of English at Chicago CityCollege and editorial board member of Tribuno del Pueblo, a bilingual anti-poverty newspaper based inChicago, exposes that myth and writes that wars benefit the rich (as noted in the Buchheit’s opening essay)