Boots on the Ground

Did you vote for this?

What we’ve got is nothing new, just heightened.

Americans sat idly by as our leaders kept troops in Afghanistan for twenty years. Can anyone tell us why we needed to lose American troop lives in Afghanistan? Can anyone tell me what geopolitical importance there is to that particular country?

I consider myself well read and can’t give you a single explanation for our incursion into Afghanistan sitting here right now. Why on earth did we maintain troops there for twenty years?

We’ve never done a proper post-mortem on Iraq. Do you have any idea at this time what government is running Iraq, how they are rebuilding, what state the people are in after what we accomplished there, what the economy is doing there, how the people are living? Do they hate us for what we have wrought, do they feel as if we removed for them a horrible dictator? I recall the talking heads discussing Shia, Sunni, and Kurds, claiming that when Britain carved up the region and created arbitrary country lines of demarcation they didn’t take into account the ethnic differences of the peoples there, lumping all three under one country-nation-state called “Iraq”. Where it might have been much more sensible to give the Kurds their own country to prevent sectarian violence from breaking out at times.

This Iraq war took place in my adult lifetime and I know more about the Marshall Plan and rebuilding of Europe and Japan that happened before I was born than I do how Iraq has fared since the end of our conflict.

Could it be possible that the worst thing to happen to America in the last fifty years is the collapse of the Soviet Union?

The Cold War lasted for decades and gave our military industrial complex a purpose. We all had an identifiable enemy, clear cut. Communists! The scourge of the twentieth century, the domino effect and spread that caused us to go to war in Vietnam, this Communism. The problem in nearby Cuba. Communism!

Keeping our military industrial complex focused on Russia, Russia, Russia prevented them from becoming antsy and bored, kept them from marrying up with the State Department and finding ways to use all the money, all the resources, all of the the might of the military industrial complex to foment upheaval around the globe.

The Berlin Wall fell, the “Soviet Union” dismantled, and though Russia itself was taken over by thieving Oligarchs and an ex-KGB mad man, the fall gave them enough economic issues to attend to just to survive. No time to rattle sabers when you need to stabilize the economy, establish an oil industry, and make sure that no more land is lost.

Absent that single huge enemy on which to focus, one might expect that our military budget might finally subside a bit, absent the need to worry about the Soviets now.

But the American military budget only grows one way, up, and when you have organizations such as the CIA and Pentagon whose sole purpose is to defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, well, better find some enemies foreign and domestic with which to point this giant enterprise against, and maybe more than one.

Stick a three year old in the woods with a bowl of ice cream and a handgun, they might eat the ice cream first, but if you wait long enough to come back to get them, they’ll have the gun in their hand. Maybe a spoon in the other.

Our military industrial complex is run by three year olds, with all that weaponry, with all that might, and with an increasing budget year, after year, they need to find trouble even if they have to invent trouble.

Why not threaten to add Ukraine to NATO, placing NATO hard and fast against the Russian border, giving us the ability to place US missiles directly across the border and adjacent to Russian land, a “red line” that Putin himself said would cause him to defend his nation, and provoke Putin into attacking Ukraine. After all, Ukraine was part of the USSR, lost to the West after the dissolution of the “Soviet Union” and fall of the Berlin Wall.

Our “Greatest Ally” in the Middle East gets a bit uncomfortable watching Saddam Hussein on the balcony shooting a rifle, looking crazed and threatening. Here we sit in America with this giant war machine. Why not put it to good use and clean house there, ease the concern of our “Greatest Ally”?

And listen up, if we can inflate the cost of these wars, inflate the cost of every weapon, service, all of it, and create a slush fund of cash that is tithed back to the politicians green lighting these conflicts, we can create a never-ending “war” that creates a cash flow enriching all that is as good as compound interest.

And all during these conflicts, generate other additional conflicts, Libya, Jordan, turn Beirut into a Hell hole that is bombed out to the extent it appears dystopian.

Here is the best part of it all for those sitting inside the Pentagon, who run the giant US war machine, the average American couldn’t find Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, or any of these tertiary Middle Eastern nations on a map, not if their lives depended on it.

Give a three year old a hammer and send him into the living room, he is going to put marks into the coffee table. Absolutely. I know this from personal experience. Had a meat tenderizer in my hand while cooking. Phone rang. Got distracted making dinner and talking on the phone, my oldest wanted the meat tenderizer, I handed it to him.

Heard him in the living room yelling “Habu, Habu”, he couldn’t say hammer, he was three, he used the word “Habu” for hammer. I looked into the living room to see him using the etched side of the meat tenderizer to decorate the coffee table. That was almost forty years ago and the wife still hasn’t forgiven me, and questions my intelligence still over that episode.

What is our military industrial complex but a three year old with a meat tenderizer in the living room?

Their over-riding impulse is to hit something using all of that available weaponry.

Can you tell me why Gaddafi had to be murdered, and can you explain to me how our Head of State could say such a cruel thing casually as, “We came, We Saw, He Died”?

Exactly how did it benefit the United States of America to remove this man from control over his own nation? The people were prospering under the man.

If you milk an incursion into Afghanistan, a needless war to begin with, for twenty years and the American people are somnambulant as you go about this atrocity, why wouldn’t you then begin to destabilize other nations. If just to create the circular grift for cash money.

Looking back, do you question? Why? Why were we in Afghanistan, and why as a people did we allow them to continue on for twenty years with that conflict and to put our boys in harms way? For what?

Maybe, just maybe, my fellow Americans, it is time to wake the fuck up.

You know, in review, I don’t think our State Department has our own best interests at heart. I don’t.

If this were a classroom, and I gave each and every one of us a half-hour to write down on a piece of paper the strategic world advantages of dismantling Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, and consuming Ukraine into NATO, at the end of the half-hour we’d all turn in blank pages.

Perhaps this is all our fault. We’ve allowed this runaway train of a military industrial complex, together with an out-of-control State Department, to have a meat tenderizer and to go around the “living room of the World” and redecorate for their own amusement and cash grab.

What is the famous line from “The Godfather”, “we should have stopped Hitler at Munich”?

Maybe we should have stopped the Pentagon, State Department, and military industrial complex at Vietnam. Between the Bay of Pigs disaster, and Vietnam, they all proved they couldn’t be trusted with a meat tenderizer.

And now, Iran.

Why?

Can you give me one good damn reason why we are about to put boots on the ground in Iran? Why one American has to lose their lives for this cause?

The Mullahs were no threat to us.

Always remember, please, please, please. This mighty Saddam Hussein was found after the war in a mud hole absent electricity or running water. So powerful was he on that balcony, so intelligent, he couldn’t think forward enough to have a bunker built for potential escape should a nearby “enemy” be able to talk America into dismantling his nation. No mountain side escape with running water, a toilet, and perhaps a few propane tanks.

Our Pentagon, State Department, and military industrial complex told us this madman was a threat to each and every one of us. Bush said it out loud. Frequently.

Too long we average American citizens have sat back and watched as Deep State Washington, DC has used the Pentagon budget, now 1.5 trillion dollars after our “Peace President” increased it dramatically last year, to wreak havoc on the world.

Enough. More than enough. They all should have been stopped at Vietnam, and Afghanistan should have never happened. Provoking Russia by moving Ukraine into NATO has proved to be a disaster.

We wrecked Iraq. We have wrecked the Middle East. We did that. With our giant meat tenderizer known as the military industrial complex.

No wonder we are hated around the world.

Iran was inevitable given the general malaise of the American people of the past fifty years to the behavior of our military industrial complex. We ignored the worst humans alive, using our own military might, as they went around the globe fomenting unrest for their own selfish desires. Disconnected from any thought of “what is good for America”?

I pray it isn’t your son or daughter that is in those “boots on the ground” in the coming weeks. I truly do.

We’ve allowed mad men to take control over our State Department, Pentagon, CIA, and entire military industrial complex, and to sin in our name.

Enough.

More than enough.

Time to take the meat tenderizer away from the three year old child.

The damage to the coffee table of the world is done, enough.

If only the repair was as easy as the purchase of a new cocktail table.