[Published by the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Mike Morris]
Tom Roeder, the military reporter of The Gazette who gets off on this stuff, reports that, “More than 6,000 Fort Carson soldiers will head to Afghanistan in the coming months.”
The war that Obama vowed, and failed, to end shows these entrenched interests are beyond the President. Trump, too, was supposedly against the conflict and said it should end.
What has become one of the U.S.’s longest conflicts will continue on, plundering billions of dollars’ worth of stolen property in a place in the Middle East that has nothing to do with American citizen’s security. The “Defense” Department is operating with a trillion-dollar budget, having already spent trillions on war over the past decade, something which the taxpayers would have never approved of were security arranged around voluntary payments.
What ostensibly began as a hunt for Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks in 2001 who was immediately assigned the blame, turned into a war lasting closer to two decades at this point.
But with today’s military industrial complex, the goal of wars isn’t “winning” anyway, but to continue handing out billion-dollar contracts to companies that serve no purpose but to build up the military.
The only way the war will be “won” is when all the “troops” come home, and stop participating in U.S. imperialism under the belief that they’re “fighting for freedom.”
Roeder quotes Patrick Murphy, a former Army secretary who confirmed the deployment, saying that, "Our thoughts and prayers are with you…Get the job done."
How so many can reconcile their Christian faith with militarism is a testament to just how brainwashed Americans are. But what is the “job” there? Why are Americans expropriated to pay for a war in Afghanistan? Do they even know? Does that mean anything to anyone anymore?
In the United States, in the national security state, the enemies have become arbitrary: anyone may be deemed a terrorist and a threat to the state, thus justifying further aggression.
Washington has gone insane long ago, and with its eyes on more “enemies”—not of the American people, but of the U.S. government—such as Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, expect the state to keep up the war chatter.
When they [Trump] say “America’s enemies”, they should speak for themselves. This constant conflation of the state and the people is how they’re able to ramp up patriotism for enduring conflicts. Sadly Americans at large still buy it.
Roeder quotes Trump saying that,
"These killers need to know they
have nowhere to hide; that no place
is beyond the reach of American might
and Americans arms.”
This exceptionalism is needed to keep people thinking that “their” government doesn’t commit the same atrocities as the alleged enemies. Because the U.S. military isn’t a bunch of babykillers too, we’re supposed to believe.
Perhaps Trump is right that no place is beyond the reach of the American Empire, but this just goes to show how far we’ve come from American ideals such as “limited government”, an opposition to standing armies, and minding our own business.
It is my personal belief that, instead of the endless praise and thanks uniformed soldiers get in public, that we should hold them all in contempt, as well as anyone who works for the state apparatus.
Instead of this "objective reporting", it's my opinion there's nothing wrong with inserting our own values into spreading the news, i.e., condemning war rather than to see nothing wrong with it, as The Gazette, particularly Roeder, do not.
Once the U.S. government admits it has no money, and its day of debt reckoning finally reaches, expect the government to ramp up their control of the economy and the military and police state—if not turn into dictatorship—in the name of “public safety” and "national security."
Eventually, they will overextend themselves, and like every Empire before it, after picking up where the British left off, the American one will fade.
A new book out by Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, makes an account of the United States’ blunder in Afghanistan from an anti-war perspective which will surely be able to teach Americans a lot about the war which they couldn't gain from the mainstream media.
While we can’t hope that politicians will read a book and say, “you know, they’re right”, the public should at least be informed on the issues as to prevent them from selling us on such absurd lies which serve as a pretext for endless wars. Our rulers will certainly ignore this book’s call for immediate withdraw. Indeed, it appears to be far from over.
We’re truly living in a post-911 world, where the terrorists—the government—deem everyone else but themselves a terrorist. Never trust the state, and always oppose war.