I grew up in the wake of WWII, was in fact born into a military family smack in the middle of the Korean war, and found myself coming of age on a fast-track trajectory for Vietnam. What a bizarre tradition. My generation was the first to balk in significant numbers. Vietnam didn't make sense. It wasn't like WWII where there was a powerful bad guy doing certifiably bad things that had to be stopped. No, Vietnam was purely ideological, it was about defeating the spread of communism, which in the final analysis is just an idea – just one that certain folks REALLY didn't like. Still, it didn't seem worth dying over.
You don't have to think too hard to realize that war is a stupid way to conduct foreign policy, not to mention a barbaric way to behave. An obscene number of young lives were squandered in Vietnam, over 58,000 Americans and millions of Southeast Asians, men, women and children. And who knows, maybe twice or three or four times that many wounded, maimed or psychologically damaged or destroyed. It was for nothing in the end. We just covered ourselves in shame, tortured a generation and rained down hell on that part of the world for better than a decade, damned near two, all for no good reason. What a tragic waste. The only beneficiaries were the profiteers, the Halliburtons and DuPonts, the merchants of death. It was all done to keep their obscene and immoral game going. Nothing much has changed.
The money should stagger you. Journalist James Risen, author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, a revelatory new book about the scammers, counterterrorism grifters, careerist bureaucrats, torture con artists, and on-the-make privatizers of our post-9/11 national security state, suggests that the best figure for money spent on Washington’s war on terror, including the Iraq and Afghan wars, is four trillion dollars. If you add in the bills still to come for the care of American soldiers damaged in that global war, the figure is undoubtedly significantly higher. In the process, an array of warrior corporations were mobilized to go into battle alongside the Pentagon and the country’s intelligence and homeland security outfits. This, in turn, transformed the global struggle into a highly privatized affair and resulted, as Risen vividly documents, in “one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history.” Halliburton offshoot KBR, for instance, took remarkable advantage of the opportunity and became “the largest single Pentagon contractor of the entire war,” more or less monopolizing the Iraq war zone from 2003 to 2011 and “receiving a combined total of $39.5 billion in contracts.”
TomDispatch
Four TRILLION dollars for a couple for crappy little wars that no one had to fight! Un-fucking-believable! That money could have been used to transform our nation in extraordinary ways. We are in desperate need of what that money could have done for us all. With that much money, we could have solved virtually all of our problems, think: healthcare, education, poverty, homelessness, etc, etc.
But no. We had to transfer wealth to the already wealthy. That trumps everything.
It's so sad that we've let them get away with this.
Once we had finally extricated ourselves from Vietnam, there was a powerful shared sense (among many at least) of having learned serious lessons about the futility, horror and inhumanity of war. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, after Tet '68, after the My Lai Massacre, after the demonstrations and the marches, after Kent State and Jackson State, after the fall of Saigon – the tragedy of it all seemed so fucking obvious that we seemed united in turning against any further such madness. But that was an illusion. The MSM kept up the pretense that we'd learned our lessons for some years but the war hawks would not turn away so easily.
Over time, they patiently and quietly rehabilitated the concept of war (even as they waged them in secret), making it seem once again like not such a horrible idea on its face. It took a lot of stupid people and a lot of dumbing-down, forgetting and rewriting of history to make that happen for them, but alas...
But let's face it, every war since Vietnam has been a dismal, soul-wrenching failure. That includes the war on poverty, the one on drugs, and all the rest up to and including the one on terror. Of the present multinational clusterfucks, Afghanistan was said to be the not dumb war. More people, logically enough, supported the Afghan invasion than the one in Iraq. But they've all been disasters, they've all produced human suffering in ungodly quantities, they've made torture an indelible stain on our national psyche. And worse than a stain, a cancer - and like a cancer, it grows. The more you feed it cruelty, torture, murder and bombings, the more the cancer grows.
The war on terror has massively increased the problem it was (ostensibly) meant to address – just as so many said it would. For every 'terrorist' we've killed, we've created a hundred or a thousand more. We went from al-Qaeda, a rogue CIA terror cell that we organized, trained, armed and sicced on the Russian occupiers in Afghanistan, only to abandon them when we were done with them, to ISIS, a brand new freaking caliphate (paper tiger or no) that we bombed and tortured into existence as we flooded the region with advanced armaments, in one way or another arming all sides and cranking up the jihadi recruitment drive.
Quick, pour more gasoline on that fire! That, apparently, is all we know how to do.
At some point you have to wonder if all these amazingly bone-headed fuck-ups aren't intentional. I submit that they are. We are moving nakedly in the direction of forever war. That's what they want and that's what they'll get...if somebody doesn't stop them.
Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve — and the leadership of the commander in chief, says Leon Panetta, who headed the CIA and then the Pentagon as Al Qaeda was weakened and Osama bin Laden killed.
"I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," he says, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.
Panetta: '30-year war' and a leadership test for Obama
With tools like Panetta a dime a dozen in Washington DC, how can the MIC fail to get their forever war?
This is a very important video. Please watch it if you can spare the time:
“We'll never know their names.”
Kathy Kelly
Not only have we forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, we can't even manage to learn anything from our most recent military fuck-ups. We seem to be entirely incapable of learning. Of course we're still listening to old Reaganites like that twisted fuckwad of a war criminal, Henry Kissinger. I wanna puke every time I see his smarmy face on the national TV giving the same kind of outrageous bone-headed advice that drenched us all in blood and brought this nation so incredibly, amazingly, devastatingly low.
Where in the fuck are the people who know better?
The Pentagon just pushed Obama into expanding and extending the war in Afghanistan, in direct contradiction to his promises and stated goals, against our wishes, against the wishes of the Afghan people and against all good and humanitarian sense...not to mention the damned U.S. Constitution. The Pentagon is not supposed to get its way in war like this. The military establishment determining what wars we'll fight has long been understood to be problematic. That's why the military is subjugated to civilian leadership, so calmer heads can prevail. But that's all academic at this point. We have become war.
War has become an essential component of our capitalist plutocracy. Without perpetual war(s) and at least one major enemy, the whole system falls apart. I would call that an indictment. Our entire system is immoral. War is the worst, most disgusting and shameful thing that people do, and we have become its embodiment. We have become war.
War is like a poison.
(Snip)
War is one of the most heady and intoxicating, addictive enterprises ever created by humankind. And the only way to guard against it is finally to understand that, at its core, war is death.
(Snip)
All of that flag-waving, all of that jingoism, that dark intoxication that war brings. And that process of dehumanizing the other — that use of patriotism as a form of self-glorification, that worshiping of the capacity to inflict violence.
From a 2004 PBS interview with Chris Hedges
Reading history is a bit like reading tea leaves, but some things are hard to miss. What goes around comes around. That much seems clear. Keep waging war on the world and see what happens. While we are busy inflaming the hatreds of the world, rapidly advancing technology is continuing to empower individuals. Asymmetrical warfare, a nuisance now, albeit a serious one, will eventually become a threat to the human race. It sure would be comforting to think that by then, we would have made peace and turned to cooperation over competition.
If we don't learn to make nice, we're toast.
We've lost all pretense of being driven by anything but the Military Industrial Complex and the shameless greed-monsters that command it. I just feel sorry for us all...and anyone who gets in our way.
If we in the USA don't stop this, no one will.