Columnist – John Sammon
Everybody expresses shock at the killings on the army base. Media outlets across the country ask “why?” So do soldiers at the base themselves.

Why did this happen?

I have the answer. America is a violent country. The base where the killings happened, the very base itself, represents the resort to armed force to settle disputes. We’re in our ninth year and countless deployments waging wars in two countries in which no effort has been made to end conflicts that have killed nearly half a million people.

America is sick. America is violent. Get used to it. Don’t express surprise. We’ve known this is a violent country at least ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Violence and serial killings and child molestation is as American as apple pie. Pick a country, any other country. Let’s say Peru. By our standards, a poor country. Do Peruvians go around blowing each other away? Not very often.

Going postal as people like to joke is an American thing. Not French. Not Libyan.

America is a country where armed force and naked power is the determinant. We’re the world’s arms supplier. We make other countries more violent too. We don’t try to work through the United Nations, our own creation, to head off disputes. We’re the world’s policeman. WE ATTACK! That’s our style.

We create false pretenses (weapons of mass destruction) to justify the attacks.

To express shock at what happened in Texas last week is to be a fool. Or a HYPOCRITE!

We can’t win in Afghanistan. The window of opportunity to cool that country down was lost when George Bush sank all his effort and our blood into Iraq. Afghanistan was ignored, and allowed to fester. Now it’s too late. We missed the bus.

We can’t admit we were wrong to attack countries that didn’t carry out 9-11, but have anti-US elements, and ignore that the perpetrators of 9-11 were Saudi Arabians. We love Saudi Arabia.

What do we have now? What’s the plan? There is no plan, but if there was a plan, it’s this. We let these two wars go on forever and keep the killing going and hope somewhere down the road, maybe 20 years from now, it all ends happy. That’s our plan.

Leave two open-ended wars going on forever.

The American people, a pack of sheep, will accept this with brainless docility. These are the kind of people who ask, “Bill of Rights? What’s that?”

We can’t pry out the Taliban root and branch any more than the Israelis could exterminate the Palestinian movement. We can’t win a strategic decisive victory. For military officers, the very people whose business war is, who make careers out of it, to call for cut-backs in random bombings in Afghanistan to try and spare innocent civilians as they recently have so that we can possibly win the hearts and minds of the people there, is a tacit admission, a Freudian slip, that we can’t win. Militarily.

Winning hearts and minds? That’s not your business. Killing is your business, to achieve a political end. Killing! Killing begets more killing.

Poor Obama. They’re going to blame him for an economy he didn’t slaughter, and two wars he inherited from Republicans, because he can’t end in one year what took the Republicans and their weak-kneed Democrat accomplices eight years to fu.’k up. He might become a tool of the system anyway and try to win some unobtainable glorious military victory that’s always coming just around the next corner.

If you’re a conservative or even a moderate Democrat, you don’t care that thousands have died in Iraq, week after week, month after month. There has never been a public admission of the total number. They don’t matter.

THEY DESERVED IT! RIGHT?

In war, violent death is a daily occurrence. You Don’t care. Why should you care now?

There were two spree killings this week in the US. There will be another next week. Don’t act shocked, surprised.

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