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It's All About the Money
by James Glaser May 3, 2009 Here we are in 2009 and still at war in two of the most pitiful countries on the globe. President Obama is worried about how the world thinks of us because of the prison we have in Cuba and wants to shut it down. President Obama should be worried about what the world thinks of us, but it isn't just that prison in Cuba that has the world upset. It is the fact that America has been attacking poor pitiful little countries for over 60 years now, and we are not very good at it. We kill way more of the innocent people of the countries we attack than "bad guys" we tell the world we are after. Just take a look at Afghanistan. We started that war in October of 2001. That is over seven and a half years ago, and Afghanistan had no army, no navy, no air force, and now we are being told that the Taliban (they would be the bad guys) are in charge of most of that country, and they are getting stronger every day. President Obama has just fired the General we had in charge of our war in Afghanistan. He has created his own military surge (much like George Bush's military surge in Iraq) with the deployment of thousands of more troops, and the new general in charge, Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, told Congress yesterday we can expect higher casualties in the months to come. Afghanistan is a war we should walk away from. In Iraq American troop deaths are up, and the war we were told would take a few months to win, is now in its fifth year. A new mile marker was posted this week with the 5,000th American Soldier killed in these two wars. We know over 30,000 of our troops have been wounded, but the number of troops wounded in these wars has been pretty much classified information. Along with the tens of thousands of American troops killed and wounded, we are told by the Veterans Administration that well over a hundred thousand of our troops are getting help for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The Rand Corporation did a study of our returning vets and reported that over 300,000 have brain injuries. Add to all these numbers, the 18 vets who are committing suicide a day as reported by CBS news. On top of all of this, we don't know what disease is going to pop up, as in most wars the veteran population ends up suffering from something they got in the combat zone. Think back to the First Gulf War. There are hundreds of thousands of veterans suffering from the debilitating Gulf War Syndrome. Of course, like the epidemic of veteran suicides and the effects of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, Washington tries to hide the numbers of injured and sick troops from the public. Right now, today, it is true when we say that we have had over 500,000 casualties from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would be understandable, but what is not understandable is the fact that these numbers continue to grow, and even with a new president who promised change, we have no winning plan for either war, nor do we have any exit strategy to bring the troops home. Like every war we have had since World War II, some Americans are getting rich off of the suffering and deaths of our troops. Oh yes, Washington will tell us all the good we are doing in these wars, but the fact remains we, the most powerful country in the history of the world, have no plan to win either of these wars. If these wars end, the money Washington spends on these wars stops, as do the profits the military industrial complex makes. No War means No Money which means No Profit. That explains these two wars and why we continue to fight them. |
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