FLUSHING SOLDIERS, MONEY AND COMMON SENSE DOWN THE TOILET
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER
Long ago, terrorists attacked the United States. We attacked a country some people said the terrorists came from.
The terrorists really didn’t come from there. The story was a lie, one of many, but, what the hell, why not, we had to attack someone, why not them?
Pretty soon someone else told us Iraq was planning to attack us with nuclear weapons. We knew the people were liars too but we didn’t care. Why did we know? We paid them to lie. Whenever we need a reason to do something bad, we either pay a liar or torture someone.
There is never any reason to be afraid of getting caught, not when you can appoint a "commission" that can make up even more lies. If someone says they are lying, you can have the Pentagon pay retired military liars, called "pundits" to go on Fox News to make the already outlandish lies they tell every day seem even more "official." No reason to worry about the chicken Democrats. They are scared to death of being called "soft on terrorism" even if the terrorists may actually be us.
If anyone gets too nosy, Karl Rove could call John Ashcroft, his lapdog. If someone was really troublesome, maybe Rove would call Erik Prince. Prettysoon, no more troublemakers.
Everyone knew it was all lies but they didn’t know. How’s that? Sometimes its more fun to blame other people rather than deal with the vermin hiding under your own bed. So, off we marched to war. Oops, sorry. "We" didn’t march off to war. With a volunteer army and no draft, there is no "we." "They" marched off to war. When they started to march, a huge invisible hand yanked a big chain. The plug came out and America started circling the drain.
STATUS QUO: LOSING AND LYING
Our current unending war, fighting a country where a handful of people may have trained or terrorists may have hidden is not going well and is utterly unwinable. We don’t seem to care. We are escalating combat and losing more and more soldiers. Our gains? 10 Taliban dead, 3 million to go?
We know that what we are doing is going to be useless in the end. Nobody trusts us, nobody believes in us, the government we support is even more corrupt than our Vietnamese allies. This time we are fighting for a massive drug cartel.
Don’t you just love our "war on drugs?" Should the DEA simply pick up everyone in the Pentagon, State Department and Whitehouse and cut out the middle man?
How can we keep this and a thousand other secrets and scandals from interfering with a meat grinder war? Is it because we have been propagandizing our own troops like never in our history? Is it because Americans don’t care because we have our first war with no draft since 1812?
THE WAR: REASONS AND GOALS
We are fighting to retaliate against terrorist attacks on America by well educated students, some financed by Saudi Arabia, one of our closest allies. The terrorists were easy to find, all in the US through a series of amazing accidents at the FBI, CIA and ICE.
The attacks were planned and performed with amazing skill and complexity and caught us totally off guard. Then we learned our attackers were all known, catagloged and attacked a predicted target in a way we expected at a time. We knew it was going to happen, every intel report said so. Surprise? Our only real question about 9/11 remains: Which conspiracy theory is correct?
Our goals to destroy the terrorist organizations are childish and idiotic. Every dead terrorist is a martyr helping to recruit a thousand more. Now we are told our terrorist enemies are operating in half the countries on Earth and growing by leaps and bounds every day. Has anyone asked why? Why are they fighting us? Is it about Israel? Was it about Bush and Ashcroft and a secret plan to bring on a war against Islam? This is what the terrorists believe. Bush is gone, why isn’t the war gone too?
It’s obvious we don’t know. We can’t be sure that they know? Why is anyone fighting at all? When the only winners are oil companies, arms manufacturers, drug dealers and, oh I forgot, politicians and everyone else is suffering and dying, figuring out why we are fighting isn’t all that hard after all.
Ever wonder how much Arab money is invested in US arms companies? Would you believe tens of billions?
AMERICA’S MILITARY: POWERFUL, AMAZING AND OUT OF CONTROL
The military machine designed to lead NATO to war against the Soviet bloc is long gone, its last gasp the quick victory in Desert Storm. A leaner war machine built on advanced technologies, elite units and part time soldiers, led, not by the best and brightest but by, to a large extent, military leaders more at home at a political rally or revival meeting than on a battlefield, has taken its place.
Fighting with no allies, we were prepared for a quick dash to Baghdad and planned to turn Iraq over to leaders we had chosen, hated by the Iraqi people and known to be frauds and liars. And, thus, our plans unraveled before they began.
Our first goal was to find Iraq’s weapons, weapons that never existed. Every attempt at fabrication failed even the most minor scrutiny. We became occupiers, jailers and torturers, eventually driving Iraq into a civil war killing hundreds of thousands of them, 5000 of us and leading America into financial ruin.
We walked into the war blind. We had too few troops, poor equipment and allowed an enemy to dissolve into the population, taking with them thousands of tons of weapons we had forgotten to secure.
Our answer? Deploy, deploy, deploy. Retain, mislead and bamboozle. We misused emergency "wartime" acts to drag veterans, civilians with no reserve duties, back into uniform and send them to war. We prevented troops from leaving the military after honorable service, instead, treating them like prisoners.
Tens of thousands of "citizen soldiers" suddenly became front line troops, some untrained, some half trained and unequipped, deployed to a combat zone time and time again in a war increasingly appearing to be little more than a combination of Presidential temper tantrum and massive financial scam.
NATION BUILDING: OUR SURROGATE ARMY OF MERCENARIES AND THIEVES
Within days of 9/11, companies sprung up overnight, all owned or represented by Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and Rumfeld friends and political allies. Leading the pack was Haliburton, Cheney’s own horror show and Blackwater, the marriage of the Prince and DeVos GOP dynasties, soon to horrify the entire world with a litany of scams and crimes.
Endless public projects were begun, on some, the only construction was a sign pounded into the ground, others were half finished and abandoned, some built and later collapsed and some still stand, water leaking from pipes and faulty wiring electrocuting the occupants. All projects were paid for, some with massive cost overruns, whether built or not.
Armies of security guards, mercenaries and domestic servants of every kind were recruited, some from the United States but the majority from the poorest countries of Africa and Asia. Their services were sold to the US government at hundreds and even thousands of dollars a day and many were paid a pittance and lived in near slavery. This goes on to this day, tens, even hundreds of thousands performing work no one knows of but draining America of billions.
Even to this day, thousands of "diplomats" cost America millions a day, all serving some unknown "diplomatic purpose" in Baghdad. Who do they talk to? What do they do all day? As far as we can tell, they do nothing at all but stare at the walls waiting for "Miller time."
Maybe they think up new ways to spend money? Until very recently, all Iraqi government business was done in Amman, Jordan. Much of it still is. So, why did we spend billions to build the "green zone" in Baghdad? Just ask an Iraqi government official. They roll their eyes back in their head, look down and then the gesture, finger and thumb rubbing together, the international "call sign" of corruption.
PAYING THE PRICE
First we honor the troops then we blame the troops. First they are warriors then they are homeless or dangerous or just too damned expensive. Early in this war, we deployed too many troops who needed body armor we couldn’t afford and IED resistant vehicles we forgot to build. Disaster was the predictable result, predicted by everyone but the Pentagon.
Then they came home wounded and had to be warehoused at Walter Reed with the rats and roaches.
Then they came home to jobs given to "others" and the Bush administration simply turned away.
Then they came home tired, depressed and suffering from PTSD. If they were still in uniform, they were recycled and sent back to get sicker or simply killed themselves as hundreds did and are still doing.
If they were "veterans" they were subjected to bureaucratic abuse, neglect, many denied medical care until thousands killed themselves, many after joining armies of the unemployed and homeless.
COMMON SENSE
Normally, a country would take pride in the quality of its leadership. After 9/11, little that was "normal" happened in America. A massive lie machine went into action, twisting the news, crushing opposition and building massive bureaucracies with no other purpose than to deconstruct 2 centuries of American progress and move us into a dark age of tyranny and corruption.
Today, we are powerless still. Federal departments from Veterans Affairs to Justice to Customs to the Pentagon are slowly, too slowly, being cleansed of the degnerates who wormed their way into power.
5 corrupt Supreme Court justices, pretending to be "conservative" crush the rights of veterans, taxpayers and those seeking accountability for government abuses.
Is America a country filled with crooked politicians, many elected through hacking voting machines, politicans controlled by insurance companies, war profiteers and scamsters?
If this is true, as the press that used to cheer these same politicans on is now telling us, do we only have the government we deserve?
What kind of country would go to war based on lies, stay at war for years and yet have no anti-war movement, no investigations, no prosecutions. Instead, we keep fighting but nobody asks why? Is there a plan in Afghanistan? Who knows?
What is our exit strategy? We don’t have one. What will we really do? We will keep on, trying ploys from Vietnam, trying to engage the population, trying to build a nation, tying lots of things, trying, but not trying too hard, only just enough to look like we are trying.
What will our result be? It’s simple. Eventually everyone will get sick of looking at us and the government and Taliban will cut a deal behind our backs. Is it all about oil pipelines and drug business like most of the world thinks? Nobody can prove this, nobody would dare even try.
All we know is that a meat grinder is operating, cranking faster and faster and nobody seems to care. A begining would be admitting that the war has absolutly nothing to do with fighting terrorism or defending the United States.
The war has nothing to do with bringing "democracy" to Afghanistan.
Why are we there? Nobody knows and nobody cares.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.
Gordon Duff posted articles on VT from 2008 to 2022. He is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. A disabled veteran, he worked on veterans and POW issues for decades.
Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.
Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world, and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist, and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.
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