On July 16, 1945, a plutonium implosion atomic bomb was detonated in the desert north of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Within a month, a uranium-based and a plutonium-based atomic bomb were detonated above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Atomic fission, and later fusion, became the basis for the most deadly arsenal ever assembled, giving the US government the power to eradicate the human population, making it history’s most powerful institution. The Soviet Union’s development of its own nuclear arsenal in the 1950s challenged US power. Per Lord Acton’s famous dictum, absolute power produced absolute corruption on both sides of the Cold War.

Their leaders saw the world in terms of an amoral chess match. Other nations’ governments were pawns in their strategies for global domination and individual lives were of no consequence. Intelligence agencies rose to preeminence, employing sabotage, deception, propaganda, political manipulation, revolution, regime change, and assassination in foreign countries, supposedly excused by the imperatives of fighting the other side’s nefarious designs. Although there was a fair amount of playing one side against the other, brutally repressive autocrats willing to ostensibly align with either side received diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military support from their benefactors.

Vietnam fully displayed the immoral depths the US government had plumbed. It engaged in regime change, assassination, deception of the American people, drug running, secret bombing of countries with which the US was not at war, false flag terrorism, torture, and war crimes—including rape and murder—against civilians. None of this was unique to Vietnam, either before or after. Estimates of the total dead range from 1.3 to 3.8 million. After spending trillions (in today’s dollars) and with 58,000 military deaths and 153,000 wounded, US forces left Vietnam having accomplished none of their objectives (its remaining partisans still refuse to use the word “defeat”). South Vietnam was eventually conquered by North Vietnam.

Vietnam has been the template for every major US military engagement since. The Soviet pawn-master resigned the match in 1991, but by that time perpetuation of US empire and maintenance of the military-industrial-intelligence complex was of far greater concern than the supposed Soviet threat. Islamic extremism was adroitly substituted for the Red Peril. The 9/11 attack served as the rallying cry against this new, supposedly mortal threat, justification for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and impetus for the wholesale expansion of government surveillance and concomitant diminution of individual liberties. The foray into the Middle East and its ever escalating blowback may already be a bigger disaster for the US than Vietnam, and if is not yet, it will be. It has certainly been a catastrophe for the Middle East and Europe, which will soon be overwhelmed by the refugee flood.

Aside from Vietnam protests, propelled in part by fear of the draft (the protests stopped when Nixon abolished it), most Americans have docilely accepted the post WWII expansion of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and its string of disasters. The mainstream media has been co-opted by the government. Coercively extracted, redistributed largess and myriad distractions keep the populace pacified. Taxation, regulation, debt, and the government’s destructive and corrupt involvement have strangled the once magnificent US economy, stifling honest innovation and production, skewing incentives towards government-favored economic activities, and rewarding cronies. Bankruptcy looms as government polic

http://straightlinelogic.com/2016/02/16/life-or-death-by-robert-gore/