I don't want to hear any shit about about my lack of patriotism in writing this piece. This is reality and you need to deal with it, we all do. My father came back violent, fucked up and drugged up from two tours in Vietnam and we have the same total lack of preparedness to deal with this now that we did in the 1970s and '80s. As for me, I avoided the military like the plague it is, but did serve this country as a State Department peace officer in Bosnia. That's just an advance "shut the fuck up" for any dimwitted commenters who are always happy to see other people stick their necks out for your military boners. My family and I contributed too much to this "USA #1" shit already.
Assholes like Bush and Obama never would be in harm's way, ducking military service one way or the other; they just get to play with little plastic soldiers on the map in the situation room and get to feel like big, big men. It was obvious from Day One of the Obama campiagn that he was as committed to keeping the killing going in the region as was Bush, one of the many reasons I did the rational thing and voted, once again, for Mr. Nader.
Honestly, how does this sound at all different from what the SS did in Eastern Europe in the '40s? One of many inevitable articles that eventually leak out with the horrible truth of the killing fields.
""Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,"
said Daniel Freeman. "You came too close, we lit you up. You didn't stop, we ran
your car over with the Bradley," an armored fighting vehicle.
With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions "and just light the whole area up," said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. "If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked 'em."
Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.
"You didn't get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong," he said. ... Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General's Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason. Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man's body to his Humvee and drove around the
neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims' brains."
Mission accomplished! Note that Obama has deployed this same Iraq-bound brigade described above to Afghanistan, where a different set of people can now be brutally murdered, maimed, tortured and sometimes raped for no fucking reason at all, blowing the money that we could have spent here on health care and schools in the process... and borrowing that cash from China, reducing the dollar to play money.
It should be abundantly clear by this point that the people we're told are "terrorists" and "insurgents" in Iraq and Afghanistan are in fact freedom fighters and patriots who are trying to rid their respective countries of brutal occupation by heavily armed, unhinged lunatics with every conceivable advantage in equipment and technology. In Iraq and Afghanistan, every day is Columbine, and we all pitch in our lunch money to buy Dylan's uzi.
In the coming decade the US will reap what it sowed abroad as soldiers come home to kill, rape and beat their way through their families and neighborhoods. Years ago the number of Vietnam vet suicides tripled the number of Vietnam vets killed in Vietnam, and I would expect that pattern to repeat as well with these wars. We should also see large numbers of homeless vets in our cities and towns in the coming decades. Large numbers of unemployed violent men with mental problems sleeping in the streets - "Hey, what's the worst that could happen?"
Bush and Obama are war criminals and we will all be heavily bearing the consequences of their brutal attempts at empire-building in the oil rich Middle East for decades to come. It was the (sorry-ass loser) Kerry campaign that killed any anti-war movement dead in this country in 2004, replaced by a movement to install people with a "D" after their name instead of an "R" to waste the country's youth and wealth on war, as if it really makes any difference. I recall the peace signs disappearing from local "liberal" windows in Summer '04, replaced by Kerry signs while he advocated what's now known as the "Bush surge." After this unlikable demi-billionaire warmongering wanker inevitably lost, no signs at all went back up in the windows, "liberal" America having sold out completely (again, as they always do), which is where we are 5 years later.
Not a day goes by that some dim cunt doesn't drive past me with an Obama '08 bumper sticker next to a peace sticker on the Volvo, which makes precisely the sense of a PETA patch sewn on a leather jacket. It's as if no one has ever listened to one of the man's speeches or seen one of his budget proposals. Obama and most Democrats have always been as committed to perpetual war as Dick Cheney, they just sound a little better if you don't listen to their entire sentences too carefully.
Had we elected Nader, Kucinich, or Paul we would have been completely withdrawn from both countries by now. We could spend a fraction of the war budget on trying to make our war puppets into functional human beings again, paid for everyone's health care, sent every child to college and still have enough money left over to cut taxes. Instead it'll be body bags and homeless Rambos well into the next decade. "Yes we can!"
Remember that Nixon was elected to "end the Vietnam war with honor", the immediate result being a ramping up of death on both sides and a spill-over of bombing and fighting into neighboring countries. Obama is being Nixon in record time. If you liked Cambodia, you'll love Pakistan.
Seeing as there's no draft, most of you found this just peachy. Let the poor kids kill, die and lose their fucking minds? "Yes, we can!"
