Ike Was Right About War Machine

Oct. 2, 2005 by Andy Rooney

I'm not really clear how much a billion dollars is but the United States — our United States — is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into.

We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today.

Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?

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Another way the government is planning to pay for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. Do these sound like the things you'd like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?

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We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.

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Full text and video available at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/30/60minutes/main892398.shtml

quotes from that great man.


"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

"May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

"You don't lead by hitting people over the head-that's assault, not leadership."

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

"Only Americans can hurt America."

"There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs."

"Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

"Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them."

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."

"Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy."

"I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare."

"I have only one yardstick by which I test every major problem - and that yardstick is: Is it good for America?"

"If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution."

"Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage."

"The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth."

"It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

"War settles nothing."


---- He was a Republican. If he were alive today, he'd be a Democrat, I think.