............................You can't bomb ideas
Bombing during the American war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos killed 2.5 million people, with millions more deaths after the war as a result of American chemical warfare. The justification for this genocidal level of killing was the fight against the ideology of Vietnamese communism. However, 40 years after that decade-long conflict, Vietnam is a country at peace that still espouses one-party communism. Despite 7 million tons of bombs being dropped during the conflict (six times the tonnage of bombs dropped by the U.S. in WWII) the idea of a unified, communist Vietnam still survived and defeated the U.S. Army.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Lebanon have all been bombed by The USA since 9/11, with the apparent objective of destroying Islamist terrorism. Yet whether it's in the form of The Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or ISIS, the ideology of Islamism still persists. The reason for this is quite simple: ideas mimetically transcend a single human life. No matter how many bombs we drop, no matter how many people we kill, Islamism will continue to exist as long as there is justification for people to fight for it. If we only provide further destruction as a response, rather than a meaningful alternative, terrorism will continue to thrive.
What do Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadaffi, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and The Taliban all have in common? They have all been armed at some point by the USA. The UK has also helped Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad create chemical weapons - only for those same weapons to later be used as justification for military intervention. The wealthy arms trade between the West and Middle Eastern tyrants has been flourishing for decades, and continues despite many of the recipients of arms eventually using them to suppress their own people.
Even more disastrous has been the arming of fundamentalist rebel groups in attempts to overthrow governments that America doesn't like. Inevitably, the delivery of weapons into the hands of violent, disorganised and internally conflicting groups will result in those arms being used against Western interests in the future. We also arm terrorists indirectly by leaving surplus military equipment lying around after we leave a warzone. ISIS recently acquired $1billion worth of U.S. armoured vehicles left behind in Iraq to help expand their Islamic State.
We must realise that pouring billions of dollars of conventional and chemical weapons into a region gripped by tyranny and radical terror groups is only going to fuel further conflict.
Arms companies have a vested interest in war
In 2013, $1.75trillion was spent on the military worldwide; with the top 100 arms companies selling $402billion in weapons. The CEOs of these huge multi-national corporations are tasked with increasing profit year-on-year, and ensuring that their companies continue to grow, forever. The main client of arms companies are obviously national governments spending taxpayers' money. So the job of arms companies is not only to convince government that military spending needs to increase, but also that more weapons need to be bought every year and - in order to ensure continual demand - military equipment should be deployed as much as possible, so they can make and sell more next quarter.
The purpose of weapons companies is to make profit for their shareholders. Unfortunately, in order to do this, poor people on the other side of the world are required to have their homes destroyed and their families killed. The War On Terror was a dream come true for weapons companies. Overseen by George Bush's Vice President (and former CEO of Haliburton) Dick Cheney; a perpetual and unwinnable war guarantees healthy growth for the military industrial complex.
Billions in tax is being wasted on ineffectual military spending
Tony Benn often said: "If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people". The sad truth is that whether it's the £3.2million spent on a two-plane, six-hour bombing mission; or the hundreds of billions spent on nuclear weapons - an awful lot of taxpayers' money is spent on weapons designed to brutalise and kill other human beings.
A Watchmaker drone, operational for two hours, recently cost the UK taxpayer £1.2billion (the annual cost of benefit fraud). Then of course there is the renewal of the Trident nuclear submarines, set to cost a total of £167billion. The nuclear 'deterrent' will only be used if it is part of an arsenal that extinguishes the human race from planet Earth, and does not keep us safe from the threat of terrorism. Only nine nations possess nuclear weapons, and all except North Korea have suffered serious terrorist attacks since 9/11.
At a time when the police are facing a 25% budget cut, and hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing the misery inflicted by weapons we helped to create, you would think that we could put such huge sums of public money to more constructively defend against terrorism.
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