{"id":18319,"date":"2016-02-26T14:00:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-26T19:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18319"},"modified":"2016-02-26T14:01:10","modified_gmt":"2016-02-26T19:01:10","slug":"tomgram-engelhardt-the-disappointments-of-war-in-a-world-of-unintended-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18319","title":{"rendered":"Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences<\/a><\/h3>\n
War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
\n

And No Kidding, That\u2019s the Literal Truth When It Comes to War, American-Style\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song \u201cWar,\u201d sung by\u00a0Edwin Starr<\/a>, hit\u00a0number one<\/a>\u00a0on the\u00a0Billboard<\/em>\u00a0Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, became something\u00a0of a sensation.\u00a0 Even so many years later, who could forget its famed chorus? \u00a0\u201cWar, what is it good for?\u00a0 Absolutely nothing.\u201d\u00a0 Not me.\u00a0 And yet heartfelt as the\u00a0song<\/a>\u00a0was then \u00a0— \u201cWar, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker.\u00a0 War, it’s got one friend, that’s the undertaker…\u201d — it has little resonance in America today.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the strange thing: in a way its authors and singer could hardly have imagined, in a way we still can\u2019t quite absorb, that chorus has proven eerily prophetic — in fact, accurate beyond measure in the most literal possible sense.\u00a0 War, what is it good for?\u00a0 Absolutely nothing.\u00a0 You could think of American war in the twenty-first century as an\u00a0ongoing experiment<\/a>\u00a0in proving just that point.<\/p>\n

Looking back on almost 15 years in which the United States has been engaged in something like permanent war in the Greater Middle East and parts of\u00a0Africa<\/a>, one thing couldn\u2019t be clearer: the planet\u2019s sole superpower with a military funded and armed like none other and a \u201cdefense\u201d budget larger than the\u00a0next seven countries<\/a>\u00a0combined (three times<\/a>\u00a0as large as number two spender, China) has managed to accomplish — again, quite literally — absolutely nothing, or perhaps (if a slight rewrite of that classic song were allowed) less than nothing.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Disappointments of War in a World of Unintended Consequences War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.\u00a0 And No Kidding, That\u2019s the Literal Truth When It Comes to War, American-Style\u00a0 It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song \u201cWar,\u201d sung by\u00a0Edwin Starr, hit\u00a0number one\u00a0on the\u00a0Billboard\u00a0Hot 100 chart. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12675,12674,7413,827,1440,862],"class_list":["post-18319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-edwin-starr","tag-tom-engelhardt","tag-tomdispatch","tag-united-states","tag-vietnam","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18321,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18319\/revisions\/18321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}