...absolutely nothin
Even though the wife and I are off the ‘grid’, we still can’t completely escape the latest media hype and hoopla that sneaks into the internet and other forms of communication like Facebook and Twitter.
I was somewhat dumbfounded by all the attention being given to the leaking of 90,000+ Pentagon documents about the Afghanistan War against the Taliban and Al-Quida. News sources are buzzing over these documents, eager to point out secrets that the government has withheld and ‘atrocities’ that have gone unreported. Lions and Tigers and Bears…Ow My!
Where in the hell did we become such a gullible and miss-informed society? It is called W-A-R people, which is another way of saying ‘legalized murder at the strategic level’.
Somewhere in the past few decades, many Americans have been mislead into the concept that W-A-R means surgically removing a single ant from an entire acre of corn, without harming a single stalk. Sorry, that isn’t W-A-R….that would be called espionage or counter-terrorism. This isn’t what we are doing in Afghanistan. Look at the congressional record morons. The United Stated declared W-A-R on the Taliban, which was the recognized government of Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Let’s take a little stroll down memory lane for a second. In World War II (the ‘good’ war), we fire bombed the majority of downtown Tokyo with wave after wave of B-29 Superfortress bombers. The result was about 500,000 killed, and get this…most of them were civilians. Nobody complained.
We also fire bombed the city of Dresden Germany, estimated killed, about 300,000…mostly civilians (and there wasn’t even any industry or infrastructure in that city). No real concern from the public on this either.
In Vietnam, we carpet bombed most of North Vietnam to take out any and all infrastructure including roads, power lines, communications, etc…..and damn, if those pesky civilians didn’t get in the way there as well. Some folks found this a bit extreme.
But now, the media wants to make a big deal over civilian casualties and botched attempts at winning the W-A-R all because of these leaked documents. Well howdy folks….welcome to the concept of total W-A-R.
I don’t seem to recall the terrorists that flew those planes into the World Trade Center or bombed the trains in Madrid as being too concerned about civilian casualties.
I think the concept that most Americans have forgotten, is that when you authorize your country to go to W-A-R, it means winning by any means necessary. The logic being, that Abdul, the 3rd world poppy farmer in Afghanistan, isn’t supposed to let the Taliban camp near his house, because he stands a 99.9% chance of being carpet bombed if he does. That is how you get rid of the Taliban. Make it so undesirable to associate with them that they are shunned by their own countrymen.
You either fight a war all out to win, regardless of the setbacks or the collateral damage, or you don’t. If we don’t like the way the war is being waged on our behalf and for our safety, then just sit back and let the terrorists do what ever they want.
It is sort of difficult to take the moral high ground, when your enemy has no concept of morality. They are at W-A-R and will do anything to win.
As a student of a Peace and Justice Studies program, I've got to say, there are ways to deal with terrorists and the unending struggles over the control or resources (the cause of every war on record regardless of what the headlines say). Diplomacy HAS prevented many conflicts that would have otherwise escalated to wars. We definitely didn't catch this one in time, and diplomacy seems like a far- off dream when you consider the fact that no one- not the Taliban, the U.S., or anyone with any kind of investment in this- wants to let go of that oil- saturated empire.
ReplyDeleteLoraine: the whole concept here is WAR is something so horrible that it should not be contemplated unless we have the understanding that what we are about to undertake will make us just as bad, if not worse than those we seek to destroy. It should only be undertaken when survival is at stake. There is no such thing as 'clean' or 'good' WAR.
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