By Les Leopold
A new book by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
Back in the 1960s, Cold War liberals and anti-war activists debated whether the United States was an imperial power or a global force for peace. Each side had its arguments, but for many that debate ended with the Vietnam War as the U.S. killed more than a million Vietnamese and 50,000 of its own soldiers to defend a French colony against national liberation. And lost.
Since WWII we have been constantly at war. It is shocking when you list them all:
Major Wars & Large-Scale Conflicts
- Korean War — 1950–1953
- Vietnam War — U.S. escalation 1965–1973 (overall 1955–1975)
- Gulf War — 1990–1991
- War in Afghanistan — 2001–2021
- Iraq War — 2003–2011 (follow-on operations 2011–present)
Medium-Scale Wars & Sustained Campaigns
- Lebanon Crisis — 1958
- Lebanon Civil War intervention — 1982–1984
- Invasion of Grenada — 1983
- Invasion of Panama — 1989–1990
- Bosnian War NATO intervention — 1995
- Kosovo War — 1999
- Libya intervention — 2011
- War against ISIS — 2014–present
Covert Wars, Proxy Wars & Major Support
- CIA operations in Guatemala — 1954
- Bay of Pigs Invasion — 1961
- Laotian Civil War — 1960–1975
- Cambodian Campaign — 1970–1973
- Angolan Civil War — 1975–1991
- Nicaraguan Contra War — 1981–1990
- Salvadoran Civil War — 1980–1992
- Soviet-Afghan War US involvement — 1979–1989
Smaller Interventions & Military Actions
- Dominican Republic intervention — 1965–1966
- Mayaguez incident — 1975
- Operation El Dorado Canyon — 1986
- Tanker War — 1987–1988
- Somalia intervention — 1992–1994
- Haiti intervention — 1994–1995
- Afghanistan missile strikes — 1998
- Yemen drone campaign — 2002–present
- Pakistan drone strikes — 2004–2018
- Syria intervention — 2014–present
Ongoing Military Presence (with Combat Risk)
- Afghanistan (NATO/ISAF follow-on) — 2001–2021
- Sinai Peninsula (Multinational Force & Observers) — 1982–present
- Horn of Africa / Sahel operations — 2000s–present
All these wars have meant that over the years the U.S. military has hired many, mostly working class, men and women to be the human side of the fighting machine and to staff the operations necessary to support it. With an ongoing force of 1.3M working for the military in recent years, that has meant that today there are a lot of U.S. veterans (about 15.8 million), and a lot of programs that serve them. Veterans are everywhere and Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon, in Courage or Complicity: How Veterans are Responding to the Assault on Democracy, describe the ways their experiences shape our democracy, and how they might help decide if we will even have one that can endure.
On the one hand they see a conservative drift, as many veterans transition from military service to the police, to ICE, and to security services. About 60 percent of veterans who voted in 2016 voted for Donald Trump, while 54 percent backed him in 2020, a decline the authors note, triggered by female and gay soldiers rejecting MAGA. On the other, they note, that many of our strongest working-class political candidates and labor leaders are former vets. Will these more progressive leaders help shape our future? Or will conservative vets? Probably, it will be both.
Early and Gordon, both of whom have backgrounds in health policy, show how veterans of all political stripes are generally ignored by our government leaders. Their past sacrifices are conveniently pushed aside or forgotten when other matters press for attention. This has put the Veterans Administration under continual assault, plagued, despite its customary high customer satisfaction scores, by threats to its funding and staffing shortages. Recent Republican aspirations to privatize the VA are, the authors say, an important wake-up call for vets to stand up and fight for their model single-payer system.
Many veterans suffer in civilian life, facing severe medical problems after leaving the services, with others suffering mentally from PTSD and other chronic issues. Veteran suicide rates are much higher than for those who didn’t serve. Too many vets end up in jail or on the street. Early and Gordon cover a wealth of the issues facing veterans and discuss the groups and programs designed to provide services and coordinate help for them. They point out that these issues have no ideology, and the shared experiences of veterans, like the shared work experiences of union members, offers an opportunity to muster political support for solutions that are not partisan.
With progressive groups trying to organize and mobilize more rebellious veterans, and MAGA with veteran leaders like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, competing to be the next Trump, there are no lack of conflicting opinions among vets. But Early and Gordon offer many ways for the progressives to organize while improving the lives of vets no matter their political color.
They also do us a great service by resurrecting the remarkable right-to-left transformation of Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), the son of a U.S. congressman who spent his miliary career as a fighter for U.S. imperialism. To preserve and enhance U.S. corporate interests, he led invasions of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Mexico, and China. As he put it:
“I spend thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile miliary force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short I was a racketeer for capitalism.”
Do any of today’s soldiers see Trump’s oil grab in Venezuela, threats to Greenland and Cuba, and the assault on Iran through a similar lens?
Even if most do not, Early and Gordon note that the military has at least one value that is key to progressive change: solidarity. Soldiers can’t succeed without watching out for each other. Solidarity does not mean the coming together of those who agree. Rather it is all about overcoming the differences that divide us so that powerful collective activity can take place. They also point out the staff of the Veterans Administration “fosters a unique institutional culture of empathy and solidarity between patients and providers that has no counterpart anywhere else in the US healthcare system.”
Perhaps this partially explains why many veterans are drawn to labor unions, where solidarity is the core value.
I wish that Early/Gordon had written a little more about how best to mobilize veterans politically. While their ideas about abolishing the Electoral College and expanding voting rights while limiting the power of big money in elections are all on point, I suspect that veterans as a whole are much like working people: many have given up on the Democratic Party and have no political home, and no path to enduring political power. Or have they embraced MAGA and realized it isn’t for them either?
Can the Democrats be sufficiently reformed to overcome that alienation? Can they give up their commitment to the war machine and again become fighters for working-class justice and fairness, which includes policies that adequately support veterans while preventing the never-ending march to war? Or does something new need to be constructed outside of the two parties, as veteran Dan Osborn is doing in Nebraska?
That difficult question may decide whether veterans end up defending democracy or going along with those who are undermining it.
Early and Gordon have written an important book that is well worth reading for their stories about all manner of life and policies involving veterans, how they’ve fought for better lives for their families and how the government has sometimes worked with them, but often worked against them. Most importantly, it will get you thinking deeply about those who have served our country and how their experiences inform who we are and what we can be.
Les Leopold’s latest book is The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One Of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power. All royalties go to the Labor Institute’s Reversing Runaway Inequality educational programs for workers.
