U.S. maintaining too many military bases

A recent Associated Press article calls Afghanistan “one of the poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries in the world.”

I would not dispute that assertion. The United States has spent $110 billion to try and rebuild it while at the same time further destroying it with our guns, bombs and drones. It reminds me of Vietnam, where we destroyed an entire village and killed everyone in it in order to save it.

The U.S. official in charge of auditing assistance programs in Afghanistan says it isn’t too late to address the fraud and mismanagement in our efforts to rebuild that country. Examples of fraud include the U.S. spending $43 million to build a compressed natural gas filling station there that should have cost $500,000 or less.

We also reportedly spent $36 million for a warehouse in Afghanistan that has never been used for anything.

Even war hero Sen. John McCain has reportedly said there are billions of dollars wasted by our defense contractors in overcharges to the U.S. government.

Another military expert, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, our late Republican president, warned us of the military-industrial complex.

Some people believe the way to peace and prosperity is to continue to increase the defense budget when it is already larger than the top 10 industrial nations of the world combined. And, yes, those nations include China and Russia.

Democrats and Republicans can both be blamed for our maintaining over 900 military bases throughout the world (at our expense) allegedly to protect the world and make it safe for democracy.

Will we ever learn that some nations don’t want our form of government, which has left us nearly $19 trillion in debt? Why? Because we are always getting involved in the civil wars of other countries.

If the Bank of China ever stopped lending us money to make payments on our national debt, I believe our nation would go bankrupt.

We can and must do better or else we soon will no longer be acknowledged as the greatest nation in the world. VERNON MCDANIEL

Ozark