Columnist – John Sammon
It just makes you proud.
Think of it, the United States, the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, has not in 10 years been able to decisively defeat a group of ragged vagabond hit-and-run insurgents some of whom don’t even have shoes on their feet.
The United States, the country instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and which outspent the Soviet Union into ruin during the Cold War arms race, now takes on two pigmy countries so backward some of their citizens still ride camels and live in mud huts.
The United States, the modern Roman Empire.
It just makes you proud.
The war that we entered into under false pretenses, weapons of mass destruction that weren’t, to a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq that wasn’t. In fact, al-Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until we blundered them there by starting the war.
Americans, some of them, like to say, “they started it, they attacked us” (meaning 9-11). But when they say “they,” they can’t mean Iraq. Even Bush finally admitted it. And it wasn’t directly the Taliban, though they provided safe havens for the conspirators, who were in fact mostly Saudis.
Now, none-other than Leon Panetta, the new defense secretary, says we’re going to focus on al-Qaeda and less on fighting Iraqis and Afghans. If the original focus wasn’t the right one, then we must have been wrong. That’s their sly way of admitting they were wrong, without admitting it.
Too bad for a million dead Iraqis caught in the crossfire, but like senators in the old Roman Empire would have rationalized, mistakes have to happen. Or to quote Stalin, when you chop down a tree, splinters fly. Of course, it’s tough to be a splinter.
John Pilger’s ‘The War You Don’t See’ — Atrocities & War Crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan
The War You Don’t See (trailer) from John Pilger on Vimeo.
Watch the film online (worldwide excluding Australia) for $4.99
The media obediently went along with all this and for good measure avoided showing American servicemen coming home in caskets to complete the deception. To their everlasting shame the media network sycophants sucked up to the drumbeat flag waving and failed in their patriotic duty to ask tough questions of officials and hold them accountable.
It just makes you proud.
Panetta added that the new focus will no longer be on surging around impoverished countries with a huge army and using overwhelming high-tech military force. He said instead we would defeat al-Qaeda, but he didn’t specify (they never do) what exactly he meant by defeat. Does that mean there will no longer be any members of the terror organization walking free on the loose? They’re all in jail or dead?
Does that mean al-Qaeda representatives will sign a formal surrender document?
Most reasonably sane people would agree there isn’t much likelihood of either of those scenarios happening. The American people who are paying for it have a right to know what exactly we’re trying to do.
What is meant by defeat? We don’t know. Neither apparently does Panetta. Nobody knows.
The American people don’t care. Like the media.
It just makes you proud.
Nobody will ask Penetta what he means by defeat, no one will ask him to be more specific. That’s because it’s not a war of specifics. It’s a war of allusions, a war of spoken asides, vague assurances casually given and forgotten and never clarified, of alleged progress made, of ground occupied, of the some-day hoped-for ability of the regimes we set up in power to survive.
It’s all vague.
In the meantime, the war goes on, a war between the most powerful country in the history of the world, the richest, and a ragtag group of insurgents in one of the poorest regions of the earth. This is a war that’s not really a war beyond ideologies because there are no front lines or capital cities to capture and the other side doesn’t really have a uniformed army with the equipment of a formal army.
Like a train that runs down a track driverless of its own accord, the pseudo war seems to have a life of its own. The American people don’t demand of their so-called leaders explanations about what we’re trying to do in these countries. Nobody knows. We don’t ask and they don’t tell.
Instead they make vague asides, like Penetta did, using the word “defeat.” What constitutes defeat? We don’t know. Obama used the word “progress.” Exactly what progress have we made? We don’t really know, and you yourself don’t know because you can’t explain it, and if you did know, you could.
Don’t say it’s killing Bin Laden. That’s too simple and doesn’t account for a million Iraqis killed.
It’s a war of shadows with real dead, but also references too vague to allow for the sunlight of reason, like the runway train, with no one in charge, going down the track. We watch it go by and hope things will work out.
This war is a war not only to defeat them in a way our government doesn’t know and can’t explain, it’s as much a war to reassure you, and keep you compliant. They use the word “withdraw,” they say they’ll “withdraw” troops. They pull out 10,000, but leave 50,000. New troops take their places. Over time, you forget about the promise, that really wasn’t a promise meant to be kept at all, but an offhand, sort of easily discarded cheerful-positive-sounding not-really-serious half-believed subterfuge.
Even now they’re asking the Iraqis and Afghans if we should stay.
Nobody cares. Nobody asks. The bureaucrats just keep getting away with it because it’s the kind of war where you can not care and unless somebody you personally know is killed, you ignore it and go about your everyday business.
This war and the lead-up to it represent the Watergate that wasn’t investigated, the Vietnam that wasn’t protested.
It’s not your business. You didn’t make it your business.
You wave the flag on July 4.
It just makes you proud.
