{"id":6301,"date":"2021-09-12T19:58:50","date_gmt":"2021-09-12T23:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marianne2024.com\/?p=6301"},"modified":"2025-06-19T23:01:58","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T03:01:58","slug":"war-machine-we-see-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/war-machine-we-see-you\/","title":{"rendered":"War Machine, We See You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe title=\"Conversations with Marianne: DISCUSSING THE WAR MACHINE with Joe Cirincione\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JPuMUinJK2A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cWe spent about 2.3 trillion dollars on this war. Two trillion of it went directly to US contractors. So while this was a horrible war for many people, some people got very rich off of this war. The contractors\u2019 stocks went through the roof. There was a 1,500 percent return on their stock prices during these 20 years. A lot of profits were made in this war selling the kind of products that the US government would buy, but not what the Afghan people actually needed.\u201d \u2014 Joe Cirincione<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Today we continue our <em>Reflections on Afghanistan <\/em>series<em>, <\/em>interviewing those with a deeper story to tell than the superficial narrative offered up by establishment sources.<\/p>\n<p>Reading about Afghanistan now, it\u2019s heartbreaking to see the consequences of the return of the Taliban to power. After the deaths of over two thousand of our soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans, the country is basically back to where it was before we invaded in 2001.<\/p>\n<p>Already, DC elite are pointing theirs fingers at others, everyone is trying to cover for their mistakes, and some major players in the war effort over the years remain conspicuously silent. The unspoken \u201cI guess we fucked up\u201d is deafening.<\/p>\n<p>For obvious reasons, many who led the war effort would prefer we not look too deeply into exactly what happened. Yet we must. The Afghanistan debacle turned out to be an eerie re-enactment of the tragic stupidity of Vietnam, and if we don\u2019t learn from this now then it\u2019s reasonable to assume another re-enactment lurks just around the corner.<\/p>\n<p>The problem isn\u2019t simply about irresponsible leaders, profits for the defense industry, or corruption within the Afghan government. The problem is also our military paradigm: the way we rely on brute force as the sole conduit of problem-solving in situations where brute force alone does less good, and can do more harm, than would an integrative approach to the problem. We destroyed things in Afghanistan, but we created very little. We waged war, but we did not wage peace. Even worse, most of the people who were leading the effort wouldn\u2019t have a clue what any of that means.<\/p>\n<p>Ah, how fooled we are by fancy military uniforms and expensive pinstriped suits. Wouldn\u2019t you have an expensive suit if you were a highly paid defense industry lobbyist? The costumes add to the glamour, the illusion that any of those people necessarily knew anything at all about what was really going on among the people of Afghanistan, or gave anything but a passing thought to the moral implications of the war.<\/p>\n<p>My guest for this episode of <em>Conversations with Marianne<\/em> is Joe Cirincione, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC. Previously Joe worked for the US House of Representatives on the Armed Services Committee and the Committee on Government Operations. I first knew Joe because of his work on nuclear issues, a topic I look forward to discussing with him further in another episode. He\u2019s a great guy and this is an important conversation.<\/p>\n<p>In our conversation we talk about Afghanistan, the military industrial complex, President Biden, Pakistan, China, and more. The only way we\u2019re going to transform the world is if we stop farming out our thinking, and our conscience. Don\u2019t think these subjects are things other people should think about, but not you. That\u2019s the kind of thinking that got us here. Let\u2019s change our thinking about the power of citizenship so that citizens can change the world.<\/p>\n<p><em>The audio of the interview:<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/5qRXFvsZPrGfgT7pMxO4FA\" width=\"80%\" height=\"150\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-attrs=\"{&quot;image&quot;:&quot;https:\/\/i.scdn.co\/image\/ab6765630000ba8ac042d337c6af6a0872b76663&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;Conversations wit Marianne: Discussing the War Machine with Joe Cirincione&quot;,&quot;subtitle&quot;:&quot;By Marianne Williamson&quot;,&quot;description&quot;:&quot;Podcast episode&quot;,&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/5qRXFvsZPrGfgT7pMxO4FA&quot;,&quot;belowTheFold&quot;:true}\" data-component-name=\"Spotify2ToDOM\"><\/iframe><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWe spent about 2.3 trillion dollars on this war. Two trillion of it went directly to US contractors. So while this was a horrible war for many people, some people got very rich off of this war. The contractors\u2019 stocks went through the roof. There was a 1,500 percent return on their stock prices during [&hellip;]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":8134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-afghanistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marianne2024.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}