Another Veteran’s Day and the nation is still at war with a tactic. The US is back in Iraq, purportedly to train Iraqi soldiers so they can defend their country against the Islamic State. Train? Didn’t we spend half a dozen years and billions of dollars supplying and training Iraqi troops, only to see those troops drop their weapons and gear and flee at the first sign of combat? Who’s fooling whom here?
On this Veterans Day, like all the ones that preceded it since 9/11, everyone who has served in the military will be referred to as a “hero.” The word hero is now so overused that it has lost all currency. If every service member is a hero, none can be. I suppose a soldier can act heroically in an illegitimate conflict, a conflict based on lies and misinformation and geopolitical calculation, it’s possible. But please, don’t tell me that you fight to protect my freedom, that’s BS.
We are told that staunch allies like Somalia, Iceland, and Taiwan support the latest American foray into the Iraq civil war. I’m certain that Somalia -- well functioning and prosperous nation that it is -- is making a significant contribution to the cause, just as I’m sure that President Obama can explain the role that Taiwan is playing in the fight to contain the Islamic State…
I’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating: if the US had an ongoing draft, these wars of choice would end because the American public wouldn’t stand for it. But because the War on a Tactic is largely fought out of sight, off the books, by mercenary corporations and remote control, the public can’t see the costs or even remember that we have been at war, somewhere, continuously, for more than a dozen years.
And we are no closer to winning.
The US is the bull in the china shop, blundering here and there, blinded by its own righteousness, deaf to the futility of its efforts. We keep doing the same things and expecting a different end result. When we toppled Saddam Hussein the genie popped out of the bottle, and now we can’t figure out a way to stuff it back inside. Syria is a wreck; Afghanistan is a mess; no end in sight, no way to back out of this folly of perpetual war.
This isn’t a heroic age, it’s a cowardly one, full of pipsqueak players, charlatans, idiots, fools, and power obsessed assholes. Perpetual war is a terrific moneymaker for American arms dealers and the security-intelligence complex, so it must be kept going.
The beast must be fed, even if it means starving the people of what they need.
No, this isn’t a heroic age at all. We search in vain for a white knight or a gilded lily; we dick around in the Middle East at our peril; we kill one “militant” and ten more rise up to take his place.
And so it goes.
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