States of Conflict: An Update – Op-Ed New York Times

In today’s New York Times, a grand old paper that flip-flipped when its editorial board went from openly opposing the wars in western Asia to giving tepid support, there is an article entitled States of Conflict: An Update in which we learn some facts. It is the New York Times’ views on the various wars Americans have involved themselves within on Muslim ground.

It is a very brief but good read of where we are relative to American sponsored violence against mostly Muslim shopkeepers, farmers and goatherders who don’t like us but may or may not be sworn enemies of the Ameircan state. We are not sure.

It is hard to gauge why someone hates you while you are standing in the middle of his country with an automatic rifle pointed at his chest and the complex issue of international terrorism is laid at his often bare and dirty feet.  His reasons for hating us are then legion. Pick one, any one will do.

It is time we got real and wake ourselves up from this delusion of grandeur that we have engaged ourselves within since the end of WWII.  People around the world do not care about our fantastic weapons systems, our first class armed forces or our now crumbling economy. 

The overwhelming majority of people that we have declared our enemies since the Gulf War spend their days worrying about proper pastureland for their goats and sheep, medicine and food sources for their families and attempting to moderate the control and influence of the incredibly aggressive and fundamentalist nutjob imams, clerics, mullahs and para-military militias that run their province, homeland, mountain tribal region, desert water hole or Bronze Age city in which they live.

They just want enough peace and quiet to get their crops in from the field, their goats in from the mountain pasturelands and their kids to a school where they can at least learn to read, even if all they have to read is the Koran.  These people just want their lives back.

And between us and the incredibly powerful fundamentalist forces within Islam that control them, they have no peace of mind.  None.

They hate them as much as they hate us, the problem for us is that the fundamentalist nutjobs that control their lives also control the governments.  This is a lose-lose situation for the goatherder, shopkeeper and survival farmer just wishing to Allah all of us would leave him alone and leave him in peace.

This is not hard to understand on this level of violence.  We do not belong in a Muslim country looking for terrorists with enormous amounts of troops and military hardware.  This is basically an international police matter. When it gets violent, it is a intelligence community matter. This is not a military matter.

When we locate the leaders we send in the CIA and we kill them.  We have been doing this since we have had our own government here in what was once the British colonies. We are not afraid to use assasination.

Now, since World War II we have decided that it is much more lucrative to take what was once a matter only for international law enforcement and for the intelligence community and we have turned it into an excuse for perpetual war. 

Guess who suffers ?  The working class American soldier and his family and the Muslim goatherder and his family.  The Patrician class just keeps making money. The more we have war the more money they make.  This is not hard to understand on this level of basic greed.

Great system, eh?

This has got to end and end now if we are going to call ourselves a civilized people. Lets take this war money and rebuild our crumbling social and physical infrastructure.  I tire of our superpower self-delusion.  I just want my country back.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)