Activist Medea Benjamin raps US military doctrine

A prominent American political activist has criticized the US military doctrine in the face of the problems challenging the world.

“Unfortunately, the United States is the leader in terms of money spent on the military, new types of technologies that would kill people more directly, more remotely,” Medea Benjamin said in an interview with Press TV’s Face to Face program.

She added that the US should engage in peace-building and providing education, healthcare and jobs for its people instead of putting its people and the next generations in debt to provide the costs for its military adventurism around the world.

“We should stop as a global community spending so much of our resources on war, preparation for war, things that blow up and kill people and that we shift those resources into ways to make people’s lives better,” she said.

She went on to say that since 9/11 the US citizens “have been in the state of constant war and every time the American people think we are going to get a peace dividend.”

Benjamin also added that the new US wars which are being fought with drones make the US more likely to engage in more wars around the world such as Pakistan and Yemen.

“So I think for young people, they have not been given any choices, really. They have been told to be afraid constantly and who they’re supposed to be afraid of shifts a little bit but to live in a state of uncertainly as to what the future might bring,” she said.

“And that justifies spending a lot of their future on war, because when you look at who is going to pay for these wars, this is put on the credit card this gets paid down on the line. And so it is our children and children’s children who have really paid the full bills just like the generation now is paying the bills for the Vietnam War in terms of paying for all the healthcare, for the soldiers who came back sick.”

Benjamin said powerful military lobby groups including contractors and weapon manufactures that benefit from wars are pushing President Barack Obama to launch new wars in other parts of the world.