Monday, June 23, 2014

Fight them there if we want to eventually fight them here

"Bring the fight to them over there or they will bring it to us on our home soil." So say the (and I use this term with all due respect) warmongers whose rationale for bombing and shooting, possibly invading and occupying other peoples' lands is the all purpose fallback to those who know that they are recommending a disastrous policy.

Those are the two options, according to these people. Either we start strafing the enemy or we can hide like cowards and wait for them to sweep across the US. Seriously.

Facile false dichotomies like this are the building blocks for senseless violence, loss of life on all sides, a broken economy (except for war profiteers like Dick Cheney's Halliburton, which netted some $39.5 billion from our 2003-2011 imperial adventure, every cent of which came straight out of the pockets of working Americans), and another round of generating hatred toward the US.

Why do they hate us? Um...because we support their most corrupt leaders, like the Saudi Royals, the Bahraini Royals, and the Egyptian generals? You think? Because we invaded Iraq on two Big Lie pretexts (Saddam had WMD and was buds with bin Laden). Could be, eh?

As usual, the war profiteers--arguably the least patriotic of all Americans, since they routinely send thousands of Americans to their deaths and rob all other sectors of our economy of federal support--are calling for violence. As usual, they are wrong.

They would have us fear that those who are taking over the Sunni Triangle--the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria--have their sights set on the US next. In truth, the only way we can reliably be sure that ISIS will attack the US is to send troops there. They will then attack those US troops. Brilliant. They will do so using US weapons, since we gave so many of them to the Iraqis, stupidly.
Why do we leave so many weapons with troops who obviously have zero interest in fighting for the country that foreign invaders have tried to create in their own image? Again, it's profitable to an elite group of war profiteers. Waste is their friend; keep the assembly lines building more, suck more profit from the American taxpayer into the deep pockets of the weapons corporations. Use it all up, even if you have to turn it over to those who will use those weapons against Americans. The only Americans they will use them against--soldiers recruited from the poor and underemployed sectors of the US--will not be those who own the weapons manufacturing corporations, so who cares?

I am not even being cynical in my assertions; this is just reality. What history teaches us is that the Islamic jihadis have many legitimate grievances and eventually attack using terrorist, immoral methods. Why give them more grievances?

The elites in Congress will not change this reality until the citizenry changes Congress. Let's do that.

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