We now find ourselves engaged in four wars, wars which are slowing eroding our machinery and which are killing our soldiers. Wars which are slowly bleeding us dry of our treasure. The war in Afghanistan was launched with the overwhelming approval of the American people in retaliation for 9/11 and is now in its tenth year. We still are not in total control of that desolate, mountainous country. Possibly we should have heeded what happened to the Soviet Union when they tried to subjugate that nation. However, our aim there was to punish those who supported the 9/11 highjackers and kill Osama Bin Laden. Both of those aims have been achieved. The Iraq war was entered into, once again, with the approval of the American people and the Congress of the United States. People now make the argument that "Bush lied, people died" to try and make some forget that there was 90% approval at the time for the president's actions. Those who didn't like President Bush have conveniently forgotten the fact that Saddam Hussein had ignored 19 United Nations resolutions demanding that he open his country for inspection, he had used poison gas on his own people, and he had kicked out the weapons inspectors. Suppose President Bush hadn't authorized the use of force and it turned out that Saddam had, in fact, stockpiled Sarin or some other easily deliverable lethal weapon? Then Bush would have been guilty of ignoring his #1 priority as president, which is to protect the American people.
I am not here to argue the past, however. It happened, we are there, and that's that. Now we have entered into another potentially large conflict and one smaller one. President Obama has taken us into Libya, and has also launched drone attacks against targets in Yemen. This makes four hot spots where we are actively engaging hostile forces, and dozens more places around the globe where we maintain a military presence. The point is that our military commitments keep expanding, eating up our national treasure.
Forget all that, for a moment, however. There is another war we should be fighting, one which would make all the current wars unnecessary. As I've said before, we should be in the midst of a Manhattan Project-style effort to make solar energy vehicles feasible. If we can do this, oil becomes a commodity which our nation isn't so dependent on, and the countries of the Middle East go back to what they were 75 years ago--desert nations of nomadic herders. They would lose their strategic importance because oil wouldn't matter anymore! So let's fight THAT war--the war for making solar energy economically feasible, and let's send the OPEC nations back to economic oblivion where they belong. The problem with this, as I've said before, is that the oil companies aren't going to just stand by and let us change to solar power because that REALLY hurts them. After all, they can't sell sunlight!
