Brother Bemused

I Like Ike

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower would never be chosen as a presidential candidate by today’s Republican Party. The GOP has veered so far to the right that a centrist such as Ike might say that the true RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) are those today who have departed radically from traditional Republican conservatism.

Just try to imagine Eisenhower giving his 1953 “Cross of Iron” speech at a Republican presidential convention in 2026:

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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Seventy years later the theft Eisenhower described continues, as funds to meet human need are increasingly funneled into militarism. Updating Eisenhower’s math to assess the financial cost of today’s Iran war is a sobering and disheartening exercise. Some estimates place that cost at a billion dollars PER DAY. (See Iran War Cost Tracker, which today tallies $7.5 billion dollars.) This, of course, is in addition to the direct cost of lives lost and injured, cities devastated, economies damaged, etc. for a war whose end is unknown.

And yet, this week both houses of Congress failed to pass war power resolutions that would reclaim their sole Constitutional authority to declare war, restoring the balance of power to curtail the executive branch’s unilateral and preemptive Operation Epic Fury.

The war hawks try to circumvent their Constitutional limits by describing the Iran conflict not as a “war” but as a “military exercise” — shades of Putin’s 4-year preemptive invasion of Ukraine? And they say it had to be done without Congressional approval to retain the element of surprise — shades of Pearl Harbor? What would Ike think of his Grand Old Party today? You could hardly dismiss him as a “woke” pacifist. He was not only commander-in-chief of US armed forces but also a five-star Army general, and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II.

Yet when he left office (eight years after the Cross of Iron speech he delivered in the earliest months of his presidency) Ike gave a similar warning in his final address about the growing threat of the “military-industrial complex.”

Today we would need to amend Ike’s caution to include the “military-corporate-entertainment-MAGA-educational-Christian nationalism” complex. But Eisenhower gave us an early warning signal, and for this I’m hanging on to my “I Like Ike” campaign button.

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