The War in Afghanistan

      The verifiable truth is finally coming out:  the 18-year war in Afghanistan has been a total flop.  A monumental waste of taxpayer dollars, live soldiers, and international goodwill.  The exact reason why our military was there in the first place was never really defined.  Who is the enemy?  What is the mission, and how is "victory" defined?  What is the strategy?  Are we there to destroy a nation, build a nation, or what?

      And worst of all, Pentagon and government officials have known from day one that the war was not going well, that the Taliban was winning, and innocent civilians were being killed and their homes destroyed.  Yet presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and their minions just kept right up proclaiming that American was winning with flying colors and killing all the bad guys, and the troops should all be able to come home any day now!

      Meanwhile, the war in Iraq was raging with pretty much the same outcome, if not worse.  We were told that Iraq was amassing all these "weapons of mass destruction", and that we were going to rebuild Iraq into a stable, peaceful democracy, in the image of the USA.  We wasted a $Trillion dollars of taxpayer money and thousands of dead and/or wounded soldiers, and killed about 100 thousand Iraqi citizens.  The military-industrial complex wins again.  Makes you proud, don't it?

      These wars, of course, came about in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Granted, America was angry and wanted revenge on SOMEBODY.  Who, it didn't matter - we wanted war, by golly, and we're going to have us a war!  So basically we ended up with a repeat of 1941; that's when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so America retaliated by declaring war on:  Germany.  Then in 2001, terrorists from Saudi Arabia attacked us, so we declared war on:  Afghanistan and Iraq.  No question about it:  war is the health of the state.

Osama bin Laden

      The neocons will claim that those two Middle-East wars did accomplish two worthy goals:  we took out Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.  However, that narrative omits some rather important backstories about how both of these tyrants were considered staunch "allies" at some point in the past.  Saddam became a "friend" of the USA during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, and bin Laden when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.  

      There's nothing unique, of course, about alliances with murderous, tyrannical dictators like those two hoodlums.  Our government has been doing that sort of thing for most of the last century.  Dishonorable mention includes previous "friends" such as Joseph Stalin, the Shah of Iran, Muammar Gaddafi, and many more.  The justification for these alliances is always something along the lines of:  "it was in our national interest".  Clearly, American "national interest" has nothing whatsoever to do with defending innocent humans from slaughter at the hands of tyrants.

      So, following the leadership of the neocons, our once-great nation drew a 180 degrees wrong conclusion from the 9-11 attacks.  They said we need MORE intervention around the world, especially in the Middle East.  WRONG!  The USA needed to get the hell OUT of the Middle East.  That part of the world has been a violent, unstable hellhole for over a millennium.  It is supremely arrogant to think that the USA (or any nation) could just waltz in there and magically convert it into a stable, peaceful democracy.  It won't work.  A better idea is just to get far, far away, and let those enemies of ours destroy themselves with their endless wars, as we watch from the sidelines.

      The neocons forget that what made America a great and prosperous nation was our culture of limited government.  We did NOT become great because we like to march all over the world to fight wars and become a global empire - excuse me, I meant "superpower".  Throughout history, lots of nations and empires have strove for that lofty goal, only to become trampled into the dustbin.   We need to return our military to its one and only Constitutionally-defined goal:  to defend Americans on American soil.  Let the rest of the nations of the world solve their own damn self-inflicted problems.