Are You Addicted to War?  Then Why Is Your Country?

What happens when you buy a laptop, a shirt, a new car, a tennis racket?  You want to get the most use out of it as you can, don’t you?  You want to wear, drive or swing whatever it is you have spent your hard earned dollars on as much as you possibly can before you have to get rid of it or upgrade.  In other words, when people invest money into something, they have an “interest” in that particular something.  They feel obligated to take care of it, and find it hard to depart with a product without getting the full use or satisfaction out of that particular product.

The same principle of human psychology applies when, on a national scale, we commit ourselves to war.  War costs money and the United States of America spent a lot of it when we sustained (and continue to sustain) our 14-year-long, and counting, military involvement in the Middle East.  The difference in price between the U.S.’s war(s) in the Middle East and the price of a tennis racket is equal to the difference between how difficult it would be to part with a tennis racket, and how difficult it would be to part with something on which you spent 4 trillion dollars.

Politicians, media pundits, fellow bloggers, and others will say that we remain entrenched in our battle stances because of our “interests” in the region.  Well, the longer we stay there, the more money we spend, the more lives we lose in that forsaken desert, and the more our “interests” will grow.  Looking back, for example, to the moment Isis overtook Ramadi in May of this year, how ridiculous does it now seem to hear pundits and politicians pontificate about how “American lives were lost" to take a particular city during the Iraq War and Iraq insurgency,? 

There appeared to be this need to keep Ramadi because of the blood, money and oil we poured into it.  What more people, especially those in charge of our military, our finances and our political system need to understand is that the urgency for action in the Middle East comes not from its inherent problems as an unstable region, but from what the U.S. has already committed economically, militarily, and emotionally.  In many ways, our expensive wars are less like a casual shopping spree and more like a terrible gambling addiction.  Know when to fold ‘em America.