"...And stay out"
Doesn't it feel good? Afghanis never attacked us but we went in there and we kicked some ass anyway as a revenge-- against the Saudis maybe(?)-- for September 11th. We haven't talked about the freedom of Afghani women for twenty years-- and so maybe it was never about that, anyway, but we marched through and we liberated them at the points of our guns. That feeling you're feeling in the pit of your stomach is really gratification for a job well done.
No military tactics were capable of "winning" this war. No additional technological advantages were going to accomplish anything. We hadn't learned any lessons before Afghanistan. We weren't going to learn any lessons while we were there. We're the anti-vaxxers of the world's military industrial complex. We're still oh-for-the post-Hitler era in winning wars. On the other hand, we haven't formally declared any of these subsequent wars-- they've all been illegal-- so we've got that to our record in the standings as a technicality.
We could have never won. Aside from the fact that we were a group of bumper sticker warriors against a band of actual freedom fighters defending their own country, we never declared an objective. But our military leaders also knew we couldn't win. The Afghanistan Papers that were leaked revealed that each of three different presidential administrations were lying to us about what was actually our utter lack of progress. How badly were we outmatched by the Taliban? Even when we're on our way out, we're still being attacked by suicide bombers. Suicide bombers, think about that. We're evacuating and they're still giving up their lives as just a special way of expressing "get the fuck out and don't come back."
Not only were Afghanistan and the Taliban never a threat to us, nobody anywhere is a threat to us. Our weapons budget is bloated, gassy, and without any enemy. Our military and its adventures only exist to serve a single purpose-- to line the pockets of five principal war profiteers. They are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman. Last year, these five corporate entities alone took $167 billion out of our national budget--even during a lockdown global pandemic. These "contractors" are really profiteers with a vice grip of weaponry upon our country and the world.
We were never there to assist with "democracy-building." We weren't actually there to help build up the Afghan economy. Our industrial capitalists are at cross purposes, fundamentally, with the economic success of other nations. Their victory would be our defeat. Our actual motivation is simply to pillage and destroy for the profit of a few. The military mission can't be explained to the citizenry in any honest fashion by U.S. government officials because the true mission is only murderous piracy. Of course the Afghan government we set up would be villainously corrupt. Ours is villainously corrupt.
There are other governments on the planet that are more vicious towards their own people than ours, but none are more vicious towards the world as a whole. None can even come close. We're engaged-- even upon another hideous defeat-- with still endless bombings of endless targets, "collateral" murders, starvations, the toppling of governments, election interferences, and the ongoing creation of countless refugees.
Barack Obama called this war on Afghanistan "the good war." He might be a war criminal, but he's no dummy. He was stealing this terminology from the late Studs Terkel from his shared hometown of Chicago. Studs titled his oral history book of World War II "The Good War," but he put a question mark after it. Obama knew the only way to sell this moral-cheapening and disgusting destruction of a devastatingly-poor country was by inferring a parallel between the Taliban and the Nazis. That's how we do. At the same time, he knew and protected the big secret of the intelligence apparatus he ostensibly controlled-- that we were losing badly and were powerless to do anything to avoid ultimately losing.
We've allowed our language to soften which each subsequent defeat since the Cold War commenced, but we are baby killers. We kill often and we kill indiscriminately. Our soldiers leave their moral consciences at home by direct order of deployment and then they return to emptiness and mass suicide after they act without conscience, if they return at all. We send robots to kill now when we run short on soldiers.
During the nightly drivel that is cable television news, the former CIA pundits still under the agency's sway and sometimes not even accurately "former," they summarize that we "didn't win," but that we didn't lose either, or perhaps it's that we defeated ourselves. They debate which of the two parties is to blame. But if ever there was an epic failure of pure bipartisanship, this fucker was it. Both sides approved the use of force, both favored escalations when their man was in charge-- two Democrats ultimately and two Republicans also. Both sides participated in and benefitted from the corruption. Representatives in both parties-- nearly all representatives in total-- approved the funnel into their offices that takes the profiteers' payouts and sends it back in the form of campaign contributions. They are murderers. It was a failure of both of our criminal parties-- indeed, a failure of the two-party system itself. The twenty-year Afghanistan blood-drenched clusterfuck was a product of the red state/blue state tumor that eats away at America. It's a colossal failure too of Senator Bernie Sanders and "the Squad" in the House of Representatives, who believe that any meaningful change can ever take place without the creation of a third party-- in fact, any third party with any philosophical leaning whatsoever provided simply that it not accept any money from the profiteers.
Of course, the Afghanis were seen celebrating this week. Since when do nations not cheer when they gain their independence? I'm so, so very glad we lost. I'm only sorry that it won't be the last time.
posted by CM @ 8:40 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home