In the Star Wars set of movies you see the fascist helmeted troops of the Emperor running around decks of floating space platforms or doing the grunt work of harassing the local planetary populations. In reality most of those working stiff soldiers should be androids from a Pentagon cost basis analysis.
Our eternal war in Afganistan goes on if only to protect the drug crops and support the local economy. This is how the last days of Rome perhaps were with sticking your nose in somebody else’s business and having them pay for your military hardware and troops. Where is the bloody oil money from Iraq to pay for that war?
We went into Afganistan to wipe out a bunch of thugs who masterminded the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center. The Bin Laden guy has been living in luxury ever since and we “can’t find him”. What bullshit!.
The Russians could not conquer Afganistan and they were brutes. The Brits could not conquer Afganistan and they could be brutes. Hey, history tells us that Alexanger the Great made it to India. No. He stopped at Afganistan, his troops rebelled and he turned back to Greece.
The military heads at the Pentagon have these drone things to fly into, spy on, target and or blow up the “enemy” - its mix and match, old toy weapons or new in the evolving handbook of war.
Our NATO ally, the Germans, the other day got caught in a tight spot, did not want to do the dirty hand to hand combat thing, and pushed the “easy” button on one of the shiny new Pentagon toys, in that instance ordering a strike by jet, and dozens of the “enemy” mixed with innocent civilians got vaporized.
As technology takes us further and further away from the human factor, our military princes delude themselves that they are fighting a winnable war with “droids”.
Aside from it being impossible to fight a land war and win on foreign mountainous terrain, we have to prop up a corrupt dictator who can’t even steal a “democratic” election with finesse.
The real horror of all this is the questionable morality of using technology on the stone age. It is not much different than the Cowboy and Indian days of our far west in the nineteenth century. That was technology against a stone age culture. Technology won.
Now it is technology against a stone culture – a stone culture of mountains, and mountain valleys and caves and an eternal number of hiding places all over the map and overlapping with the geographic boundaries of Pakistan etc. The stone culture wins.
Nobody puts morality or value on the killing of civilians as collateral damage in the Pentagon spreadsheets. American wars used to be fought by American boys knowing why they were fighting. Now we wait for the press releases to give us the lastest on body counts of us and “them”. That’s what Vietnam turned into – a body count, real and imagined – a quarterly spreadsheet report. Now our wars are fought by contractors and drones. Which bodies do you count?
It goes way beyond a so called Christian nation against a so called Muslim nation. If it is a religious Crusade, we will lose. We lose all crusades in the end especially when we become only temporary occupiers of a foreign land far from home
In the end, Rome had to withdraw its soldiers from the far ends of its empire to defend the city of Rome itself. Washington is the modern day Rome – Roma Nova – and America desperately needs its resources back home.
Obama may be a popular, slick Harvard educated, corporate lawyer and savvy politician. But in the end, along with the gold wasted and body counts mounting, he ain’t no Alexander the Great.
Bring our boys and girls home!
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