America's Evil Wars

Two important blasts of truth just erupted through the haze of obstruction around the United States' current wars. One is the wiki-leak posting of hundreds of thousands of documents from inside the military command. These documents expose an environment of depravity that gives full force to William Tecumseh Sherman’s claim “War is hell.”

The wiki-leaks papers show that the Iraq Army tortured prisoners on a wide scale with the knowledge of the US military. This torture was just as bad as that inflicted under the previous regime of Saddam Hussein.

In other words, the claim that we are fighting for human rights has gone down the toilet along with the rest of our leaders’ excuses and deceptions. Iraq is currently a vicious place to live, where the people still have no reliable electricity after seven years, despite the disappearance of billions of dollars into Dick Cheney’s corporate buddy Halliburton, which was given no-bid contracts.

I still remember how George W. Bush and his lackeys told us that the war in Iraq would be over in a matter of months. HAH!

The sleaze and torture and sick twisted violence are utterly disgusting. It is amazing and sad that the population of the US is so brainwashed and shallow that they cannot own up to the evil that their Empire is inflicting.

This brings me to the second important moral message: Bob Herbert’s excellent and incisive piece in the New York Times titled “The Way We Treat Our Troops”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html


It is easy to sum up this brilliant article: we treat our youths in uniform like shit and we don’t even seem to care. The vast bulk of the US population plods through its day without even a second of wonder about how much pain and fear these young men and women are immersed in.

Our collective karma as a nation is going straight into darkness. Herbert damns us with stinging insights about our denial and immaturity:

We can get fired up about Lady Gaga and the Tea Party crackpots. We’re into fantasy football, the baseball playoffs and our obsessively narcissistic tweets. But American soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land? That is such a yawn.

Herbert also makes it clear that the two wars we are now fighting are ridiculous and abominable. They have no definite goal, they have been horribly bungled, and they are utterly compromised by sin. He calls both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts “world-class fiascos.”

Regarding the Afghan nightmare, he is particularly hard-hitting:

The war in Afghanistan, the longest in our history, began on Oct. 7, 2001. It’s now in its 10th year. After all this time and all the blood shed and lives lost, it’s still not clear what we’re doing. Osama bin Laden hasn’t been found. The Afghan Army can’t stand on its own. Our ally in Pakistan can’t be trusted, and our man in Kabul is, at best, flaky. A good and humane society would not keep sending its young people into that caldron.

Herbert is right. We are no longer a “good and humane society.” We need to WAKE UP now. Otherwise, if there is a God in heaven we are all going to the fiery pits. Branded across our naked chests, in small yet agonizing font, will be the same statement of divine judgement:

COMPLACENT HEDONISTIC CONSUMER WHO IGNORED THE PLIGHT OF MISTREATED TROOPS.



What is wrong with us?


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