We have to take stock of where eight years of war has lead us.

In today’s Washington Post we see an article entitled Yemen’s internal divide complicates U.S. efforts against al-Qaeda, analysts say that pretty much points out our problem.  We are in political quicksand relative to the "terror wars".  The more we move, the deeper we get sucked into the mire of death.  We need to take immediate stock of ourselves.  We have to get out of this mess.  And its a mess of our own making starting on 9/12.

It is just too politically, fiscally and emotionally expensive on our people, our government and our national psyche.  We have made a giant mistake in taking an international police and intelligence communities problem and making it an American defense problem.  We took the events of 9/11 and for a hundred different reasons, we militarized our response.  And the people on the other end of that response moved further into terror mode. Now what?

Lets stop for a minute and reflect on the money spent and the lives already taken and the injuries already incurred on America and her allies, the Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis and others involved in this never ending mess and those to come in the future.  The toll is huge and growing every day. We have made a mistake.

I am just going to say it.  We cannot "war" our way toward peace when the situation does not involve clear military objectives that can offer cessation of hostilities once military objectives are met.  The entire purpose of a Western nation waging war under the Just War Theory is to take away the enemy’s ability to make war.  That is how the West fights its wars. 

We knock out power plants, roads, bridges, army bases, munitions factories, ship yards, airfields, etc. and when the enemy can no longer wage traditional warfare, we sue for a peace treaty and then we spend the next thirty years making war movies about how courageous and brave we were in "that great war".

This situation does not lend itself to these interventions.  This is completely different situation where traditional military objectives are useless.  We need to get the hell out of there while we still have an economy and a national soul to actually protect.  We are quickly losing both in the hell we have helped create in Western and Central Asia.

What we have essentially done is take the tragedy of 9/11 and bend it to the purposes of the mega-wealthy.  These "giants" own and manipulate the arms and munitions industry, the energy cartels who lust after western and central Asian oil and the emerging market manipulators who are scared to death that the emerging and strengthening economies of Russia and China are going to pre-empt American robber barons from turning millions into billions in those markets overseas.

What this all boils down to is this. 

We are taking young working class Americans who cannot find work and are enlisting in the Armed Forces for employment purposes and we are (1) killing and maiming them for the economic satisfaction of our elites, (2) turning them into sociopathic criminals due to our propensity to send them into combat four and five times and (3) destroying their families and their futures by breaking their spirit and altering their life paradigms so significantly that they will be on mental health medication the rest of their lives to keep from destroying everything around them.

We are in essence a national version of Viktor Frankenstein and we have built our own monster.  He is unstable, murderous and unaware that he is so powerfully dangerous to the rest of us that we now fear him.  He is the armed forces. We have done this to ourselves in the name of "freedom" and "justice" and "righteous anger".

No one with half a brain is fooled.  It is now obvious to even the slowest group of third grade readers that something is wrong with our national direction vis a vis national defense.  We have militarized what is essentially a philosophical problem.  1.2 billion Muslims worldwide are now engaged in a vicious and brutal War of the Reformation with each other and they will drag us along if they get the chance.  We have so far cooperated with that insanity.

We need to disengage as much as we possibly can to save ourselves from perdition relative to falling into this endless hole of violence that serves only the fringe elements of Muslim society. Terror is a control technique used to force various factions of Muslims to continue to slay each other over doctrinal and dogmatic differences, ancient tribal hatreds and tensions growing out of the artificiality of the national boundaries of virtually all Middle Eastern countries.  These are boundaries that we ourselves put in place after WWI.  We are paying for this miscalculation now.

We need to see this for what it is, a religious war using ancient techniques of terror to amplify a small portion of Muslim fanatics’ power base into something that is way out of line with their actual strength.

We need to step back, withdraw our troops immediately, take that money and those resources dedicated to war and completely revamp our own decaying and dying social and physical infrastructure so that we can honestly compete in the world market and raise the living standards of our people.

Or we can continue to use "the war against terror" as an excuse to make the already wealthy into the mega-rich of the new century.

Having an incredibly powerful and politically influential armed forces supported by an impoverished and increasingly struggling tax base is the very heart of fascism.  We are now there.

So what do you want to do?  What are you prepared to do to stop these senseless wars and fashion Amerika into America again?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)