[ At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national
resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to
turn things around.] [[link removed]]

IMAGINE IF WE HAD SPENT THE LAST 20 YEARS FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE
INSTEAD OF THE WAR ON TERROR  
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Sarah Lazare
September 7, 2021
In These Times
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_ At the dawn of the new millennium, we directed our national
resources in the exact wrong direction. But it’s not too late to
turn things around. _

Homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed after Hurricane
Maria,a Category 5 storm, roared across Puerto Rico, September 27,
2017., U.S. Air Force photo by SSgt. Michelle Y. Alvarez-Rea // Air
Force Magazine

 

Twenty years into a nebulous ​“War on Terror,” the United
States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane
Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change,
flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at
least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and
in squalid
[[link removed]] evacuation
facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and
droughts — all forms of extreme weather that the Global South
has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the
new ​“normal” in the United States.

The U.S. government has turned the whole globe into a potential
battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger ​“out there,”
when, in reality, the danger is right here — and is partially of
the U.S. government’s own creation
[[link removed]].
Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the
climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It’s
critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the
oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb
emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing
on other potential frameworks under which the United States could
relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not
academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate
scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of
millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed
into the sea.

One of the most obvious lessons is financial: We should have been
putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than
pouring public goods into the war effort. According to a recent
report
[[link removed]] by
the ​​National Priorities Project, which provides research about
the federal budget, the United States has spent $21 trillion over the
last 20 years on ​“foreign and domestic militarization.” Of
that amount, $16 trillion went directly to the U.S.
military — including $7.2 trillion that went directly to
military contracts. This figure also includes $732 billion for
federal law enforcement, ​“because counterterrorism and border
security are part of their core mission, and because the
militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration
both owe much to the activities and influences of federal
law enforcement.”

Of course, big government spending can be a very good thing if it
goes toward genuine social goods. The price tag of the War on Terror
is especially tragic when one considers what could have been done with
this money instead, note the report’s authors, Lindsay Koshgarian,
Ashik Siddique and Lorah Steichen. A sum of $1.7 trillion could
eliminate all student debt, $200 billion could cover 10 years of
free preschool for all three and four year olds in the country. And,
crucially, $4.5 trillion could cover the full cost of decarbonizing
the U.S. electric grid.

But huge military budgets are not only bad when they contrast with
poor domestic spending on social goods — our bloated Pentagon
should, first and foremost, be opposed because of the harm it does
around the world, where it has roughly 800 military bases, and
almost a quarter of a million troops permanently stationed
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other countries. A new report
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Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that
between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been
killed ​“directly in the violence of the U.S.
post‑9/​11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and
elsewhere.” This number could be even higher. One estimate
[[link removed]] found
that the U.S. war on Iraq alone killed one million Iraqis.

Still, the financial cost of war is worth examining because it reveals
something about the moral priorities of our society. Any genuine
effort to curb the climate crisis will require a tremendous
mobilization of resources — a public works program on a scale
that, in the United States, is typically only reserved for war. Now,
discussions of such expenditures can be a bit misleading, since the
cost of doing nothing to curb climate change is limitless: When the
entirety of our social fabric is at stake, it seems silly to debate
dollars here or there. But this is exactly what proponents of climate
action are forced to do in our political climate. As I reported
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March 2020, presidential candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary
were grilled about how they would pay for social programs, like
a Green New Deal, but not about how they would pay for wars.

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) estimated
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the Green New Deal would cost $10 trillion. Her critics on the
Right came up
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their own number of up to $93 trillion, a figure that was then used
as a talking point to bludgeon any hopes of the proposal’s passage.
But let’s suppose for a moment that this number, calculated by
American Action Forum, were correct, and the price of a Green New
Deal came to 4.43 times the cost of 20 years of the War on Terror?
So what? Shouldn’t we be willing to devote far more resources to
protecting life than to taking it? What could be more valuable than
safeguarding humanity against an existential threat?

The reality is that warding off the worst-case scenario of climate
change, which the latest IPCC report
[[link removed]] says is still possible,
will require massive amounts of spending upfront. Not only do we have
to stop fossil fuel extraction and shift to decarbonized energy, but
we have to do so in a way that does not leave an entire generation of
workers destitute. Several proposals for how to achieve this have been
floated: a just transition for workers; a revamping of public
transit and public housing; public ownership of energy industries for
the purpose of immediately decarbonizing them; global reparations for
the harm the United States has done. Any way you look at it,
meaningful climate legislation will require a huge mobilization of
public resources — one that beats back the power of capital. And
of course, dismantling the carbon-intensive
[[link removed]] U.S.
military apparatus must be part of the equation. 

In our society, it’s a given that we spend massive amounts of these
public resources on military expansion year after year, with the
National Defense Authorization Act regularly accounting for more than
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of all discretionary federal spending (this year being no exception
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despite President Biden’s promise to end ​“forever wars”).
Over the past 20 years, the mobilization behind the War on Terror
has been enabled by a massive propaganda effort. Think tanks financed
by weapons contractors have filled cable and print media
with ​“expert” commentators on the importance of open-ended
war. Longstanding civilian suffering as a result post‑9/​11 U.S.
wars has been ignored
[[link removed]].
From abetting
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Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to
the demonization
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anti-war protesters as ​“terrorist” sympathizers, the organs of
mass communication in this country have roundly fallen on the side of
supporting the War on Terror, a dynamic that is in full evidence
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media outlets move to discipline President Biden for actually ending
the Afghanistan war.

What if a similar effort had been undertaken to educate the public
about the need for dramatic climate action? Instead of falsehoods and
selective moral outrage, we could have had sound, scientifically-based
political education about the climate dangers that Exxon has known of
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more than 40 years. We could have spent 20 years building the
political will for social transformation. It may seem ridiculous to
suggest that the war propaganda effort could have gone toward
progressive ends: After all, the institutions
responsible — corporate America, major media outlets and
bipartisan lawmakers — were incentivized against such a public
service, and would never have undertaken similar efforts for
progressive ends. 

But this gets at something crucial — if difficult to
quantify — about the harm done by 20 years of the War on
Terror. The push for militarization has been used to shut down exactly
the left-wing political ideas that are vitally needed to curb the
climate crisis. As I argued
[[link removed]] in
February 2020, U.S. wars have repeatedly been used to justify
a crackdown on left-wing movements. World War I saw passage of the
Espionage Act, which was used to crack down on anti-war protesters and
radical labor organizers. The Cold War was used as pretext for
crackdowns on a whole host of domestic movements, from communist to
socialist to Black Freedom, alongside U.S. support for vicious
anti-communist massacres around the world. The War on Terror was no
different, used to justify passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was used
to police and surveil countless protesters, including
environmentalists. The Global Justice Movement was sounding the alarm
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the climate crisis in the late 1990s, and was not only subjected to
post‑9/​11 government repression, but was then forced to refocus
on opposing George W. Bush’s global war effort.

The War on Terror also makes it nearly impossible to attain the kinds
of global cooperation we need to address the climate crisis. It is
difficult for countries to focus on making the transformations needed
to curb climate change when they are focused on trying to survive U.S.
bombings, invasions, meddling and sanctions. And it’s difficult to
force the United States to reverse its disproportionate climate harms
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perpetual war and confrontation is the primary American orientation
toward much of the world, and the vast majority of U.S. global
cooperation is aimed at maintaining this footing.

Such grim reflections on the climate harms wrought by 20 years of
the War on Terror do not amount to a nihilistic ​“I told you
so.” We vitally need to apply these grisly lessons now, as the
nebulous ​“War on Terror” is still being waged, from drone wars
in Somalia to the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Meanwhile, while Biden claims
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be ​“ending an era of major military operations to remake other
countries,” he is overseeing an increasingly confrontational posture
toward China, an approach championed by members of Congress in both
parties. As dozens
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environmental and social justice organizations noted in July, it is
inconceivable that the world can curb the climate crisis without the
cooperation of the United States (the biggest per-capita greenhouse
gas emitter) and China (the biggest overall greenhouse gas emitter).
Instead of militarizing the Asia-Pacific region to hedge against
China, the United States could acknowledge this stark reality and
launch an unprecedented effort for climate cooperation with China. 

The possibilities for an alternative global orientation are both vast
and difficult to know. What we do know is that the status quo of the
War on Terror is not working. In addition to the hospitals
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has bombed, the homes
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destroyed, the factories
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has obliterated, and the people it has terrorized
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the American military project has deeply worsened the climate crisis.
And that crisis is now, undeniably, on our shores.

_[SARAH LAZARE is web editor and reporter for In These Times
[[link removed]]. She comes from a background in
independent journalism for publications including The Intercept,
Common Dreams, The Nation, and Tom Dispatch. She tweets at
@sarahlazare [[link removed]].]_

_Reprinted with permission from In These Times
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All rights reserved. _

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