A brand new year (almost) and a new opportunity for me to bitch and moan about our continuous and endless wars. (Yes I am a staunch antiwar writer)
I appreciate the new opportunities.
We, the U.S. A., have been fighting one war for damn near two decades, 2020 will be the 19th year of the war, and there seems to be no way out of the quagmire we have created for ourselves.
Those endless conflicts are having a toll……
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer was fired last month, a consequence of President Donald Trump’s foolish decision to pardon three servicemen who were either convicted of or awaiting trial for crimes committed in combat. The president has been rightly excoriated for these pardons, which dishonor the U.S. military and may degrade good order and discipline. But amid this uproar, Americans should note the bigger lesson: Endless wars, especially endless counterinsurgency or counterterrorism wars, slowly chip away at both a military’s ethics and its critical war-fighting skills.
It is time for us mere mortals to start taking command to the rhetoric…..like how much are these endless wars costing the American people?
Wars cost too much.
That’s really not a surprise. The surprise is how much more they cost than we’ve been told.
It might help to think of the nation’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq like a pair of icebergs. The Pentagon has a web page that tells us how much we’ve each paid for the wars. But that only tells us how much of those icebergs we can see above the waves. While it includes totals for war fighting, it doesn’t track the Pentagon’s bigger war budget, interest paid on money we’ve borrowed to fight the wars, veterans’ care, and other ancillary costs. There’s a whole lot more hidden beneath the waves. The real issue isn’t whether the cost of war is high; the issue is why the U.S. government keeps under-estimating it, and why U.S. citizens and taxpayers keep tolerating it.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2019/12/adding-up-the-cost-of-our-never-ending-wars/
Now ask….is it possible to get out of all these endless wars?
Donald Trump in 2016 ran in opposition to the Iraq war and more generally to massive US commitments around the world. His denunciations of “endless wars” resonated enough that many voters ignored his documented early support for the Afghan and Iraq wars. Indeed, areas where casualties in those wars were highest voted more heavily for Trump than other demographic and economic factors would have predicted. Voters, with plenty of justification from her record as Secretary of State, thus pegged Hillary Clinton as a warmonger.
Trump, at least so far, is a militarist too. He has yet to withdraw the remaining troops from Afghanistan or Iraq. In Syria, he ended up merely redeploying soldiers from the border with Turkey to further within the country, if anything deepening American involvement. In the rest of the world, Trump has yet to close a single base or return home any troops stationed abroad.
Can the US Get Out of Its Endless Wars?
We can get out of these wars….but it will take courage and a spine from the voter….
I am not sure the American voter is ready for a change….especially in foreign policy……when there they WILL make a difference.
I Read, I Wrote, You KNow
“lego ergo scribo”
Voters have to understand the problem before they can vote for change and I guarantee you there is not one in 10 Americans who have the slightest knowledge about how foreign affairs work … so until American starts educating the citizens, there will be no change.
Ignorance is NO excuse….chuq
Ignorance might not be any excuse but it is the fact of the days in which we are living. Most Americans are “Herd Followers.”
If they spent more time on news and facts and less on slogans and social media……then they would be less ignorant….chuq
First of all, they have to find trustworthy New sources — something that is becoming more and more difficult in the United States as most of the Main Stream Media is owned by corporate interests who dictate their own version of events — and facts would be nice if the fact checkers can be trusted.
We can agree that the MSM is nothing more than a propaganda tool….there are trusted sites but it requires a search and Americans are too blame lazy for that….chuq
Give me some please
😎
so, you can’t name a few for me or you don’t want to —???
Some what…did I miss it? chuq
Trusted sites? It will be different for others but for me American Conservative, National Interest, Counterpunch, Common Dreams, just to name a couple…..chuq
thanks. I will make use of these.
If they will help…..chuq
I can actually see more of these wars, not less, and no end to them.
Until the time when everyone has to do compulsory military service again, it is always ‘someone else’ dying in them.
Best wishes, Pete.
There it is….but until then we will fight and die….chuq