SNATCHING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF DEFEAT
It’s time to declare defeat in our Middle East wars and bring every soldier and contractor home.
That’s right, declare defeat, not victory, and bring them all home.
Declare defeat because that is all we have achieved in our made up, unnecessary, senseless and murderous wars of conquest over Afghanistan, Iraq, and the upcoming one looming on the horizon in Iran, not to mention the innocents we kill with our cowardly drone bombers in Pakistan.
Most folks I dialogue with neither care nor understand why we are engaged in these defeats which are bankrupting our country even as they slaughter untold thousands of harmless civilians besides the American military and contractor deaths. A not-uncommon response is to nuke the whole region and be done with it. Clearly, the war party which initiates and prosecutes these endless losing wars, knows the apathy and powerlessness of our citizenry allows them to maintain the gravy train of an annual 700 billion dollar war budget as long as they wish. And they wish it to go on forever.
If Japan and Germany could come to terms with their defeats for starting unnecessary wars in the 1930’s and 1940’s and go on to become thriving and peace loving members of the world community, so can the United States. The lessons of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials after World War II were designed to discourage all nations from launching unnecessary, pre-emptive wars, and not exclude the very countries such as the US and Britain who prosecuted those trials.
America has a long history of exploiting seemingly aggressive actions by potential combatants to gin up unnecessary wars. The explosion aboard the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, was the catalyst for declaring unnecessary war on Spain two months later to kick Spain out of Cuba and acquire our first empire of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico in the process. Sadly, we’ve grown to love acquiring client states around the world as our recent acquisitions of Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate.
Sixty-six years after the USS Maine incident, America used a minor skirmish between North Vietnam and American naval vessels in the in the Gulf of Tonkin, to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 7, 1964, which essentially gave the green light to President Johnson to escalate the American military buildup in Vietnam to over half a million soldiers, fifty-eight thousand of which died. If we had a memorial for the two million Vietnamese we needlessly slaughtered, it would be forty times larger than the one for the US dead. The war went on years longer than necessary to allow President Nixon to apply the lipstick of victory on the pig of defeat.
Historians are virtually unanimous that both alleged aggressive acts against the US which helped precipitate those needless wars were just that: alleged, with no basis in fact.
And that brings us to the September 11, 2001 attacks. We could not have dishonored the casualties of those horrendous events more than we did by our use of those attacks to launch pre-emptive wars to take over two countries. These wars have increased rather than reduced the terrorist threat to America by validating the claims of terrorists that America’s goal is conquest and interference in the Muslim world. We had only one mission regarding terrorists based in Afghanistan: kill them and get out. Iraq deserved neither a smart bomb from the air nor a boot on the ground. But the takeover of the first land, ideal for a natural gas pipeline, and the colossal reservoir of oil in the second, was irresistible and doable once September 11 occurred.
After ninety-five months of Afghan occupation and seventy-eight months of Iraq occupation, maintained by the puppet governments we installed in both, we remain powerless to extricate ourselves under our current expansionist and war making paradigm, and powerless to stop our slide into moral and financial bankruptcy.
But when we finally come to our senses, declare defeat and begin full withdrawal, an amazing thing will happen: we will begin to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Originally published in the Naperville Sun, September 24, 2009
That’s right, declare defeat, not victory, and bring them all home.
Declare defeat because that is all we have achieved in our made up, unnecessary, senseless and murderous wars of conquest over Afghanistan, Iraq, and the upcoming one looming on the horizon in Iran, not to mention the innocents we kill with our cowardly drone bombers in Pakistan.
Most folks I dialogue with neither care nor understand why we are engaged in these defeats which are bankrupting our country even as they slaughter untold thousands of harmless civilians besides the American military and contractor deaths. A not-uncommon response is to nuke the whole region and be done with it. Clearly, the war party which initiates and prosecutes these endless losing wars, knows the apathy and powerlessness of our citizenry allows them to maintain the gravy train of an annual 700 billion dollar war budget as long as they wish. And they wish it to go on forever.
If Japan and Germany could come to terms with their defeats for starting unnecessary wars in the 1930’s and 1940’s and go on to become thriving and peace loving members of the world community, so can the United States. The lessons of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials after World War II were designed to discourage all nations from launching unnecessary, pre-emptive wars, and not exclude the very countries such as the US and Britain who prosecuted those trials.
America has a long history of exploiting seemingly aggressive actions by potential combatants to gin up unnecessary wars. The explosion aboard the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, was the catalyst for declaring unnecessary war on Spain two months later to kick Spain out of Cuba and acquire our first empire of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico in the process. Sadly, we’ve grown to love acquiring client states around the world as our recent acquisitions of Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate.
Sixty-six years after the USS Maine incident, America used a minor skirmish between North Vietnam and American naval vessels in the in the Gulf of Tonkin, to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 7, 1964, which essentially gave the green light to President Johnson to escalate the American military buildup in Vietnam to over half a million soldiers, fifty-eight thousand of which died. If we had a memorial for the two million Vietnamese we needlessly slaughtered, it would be forty times larger than the one for the US dead. The war went on years longer than necessary to allow President Nixon to apply the lipstick of victory on the pig of defeat.
Historians are virtually unanimous that both alleged aggressive acts against the US which helped precipitate those needless wars were just that: alleged, with no basis in fact.
And that brings us to the September 11, 2001 attacks. We could not have dishonored the casualties of those horrendous events more than we did by our use of those attacks to launch pre-emptive wars to take over two countries. These wars have increased rather than reduced the terrorist threat to America by validating the claims of terrorists that America’s goal is conquest and interference in the Muslim world. We had only one mission regarding terrorists based in Afghanistan: kill them and get out. Iraq deserved neither a smart bomb from the air nor a boot on the ground. But the takeover of the first land, ideal for a natural gas pipeline, and the colossal reservoir of oil in the second, was irresistible and doable once September 11 occurred.
After ninety-five months of Afghan occupation and seventy-eight months of Iraq occupation, maintained by the puppet governments we installed in both, we remain powerless to extricate ourselves under our current expansionist and war making paradigm, and powerless to stop our slide into moral and financial bankruptcy.
But when we finally come to our senses, declare defeat and begin full withdrawal, an amazing thing will happen: we will begin to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Originally published in the Naperville Sun, September 24, 2009
posted by Walt Zlotow at 4:09 PM
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