We’re at war again. Truth be told, we never weren’t at war. I admit it. I had high hopes for President Obama when I first cast a ballot for him in 2008, but since then, he’s failed me and our nation again and again. It’s sad. He promised to get us out of Iraq, but getting out was never really getting out. If we had really gotten out, the only Americans left in Iraq would be those foolish enough to be employed there, by Shell or Exxon or Halliburton. None of them would be employed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that was never the case. Even when we withdrew, we left behind a few hundred “advisors” and “trainers” and “logistical personnel”. Now we have a couple thousand boots on the ground, who surprisingly, in what has become an ever increasingly Orwellian version of reality, are not actually boots on the ground, apparently just boots floating inches off the desert sand, without leaving so much as a footprint. We’ve got thousands of guys over there, mostly in Army BDU’s, but god knows how many in whatever Blackwater wears these days. Their boots are not on the ground of Camp Lejeune or Fort Bragg or Fort Benning…they’re on the fucking sands of Kirkuk and Takrit…so unless you have some different concept of gravity and geography than I do, we have boots on the ground. Anyone who seriously believes that those troops won’t be joined by others, perhaps many others, perhaps as many or more as were trapped in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam for a long painful deadly exercise in futility, are deluding themselves. Just yesterday, Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno announced that an “Army Division Headquarters” would be moved to Iraq…which is at least 100 GI’s and perhaps as many as 500. And just what do you suppose a division headquarters is going to be directing…ummm…perhaps a division?
And on Monday, the powers that be just had to interrupt “Dancing With The Stars” for an ABC “special announcement”: We were bombing inside Syria! The military had thoughtfully provided some of that footage of spookily lighted and slightly grainy buildings somewhere in the desert, lined up in the reticle and crosshairs of an overhead targeting camera, then being pierced by a missile and promptly exploding in a huge gout of flame and smoke. The elucidative graphic, also presumably supplied by the Pentagon’s Public Information department, showed 138 little bursts of flame on a map of Iraq and Syria, each colorful icon representing the impact point of a bomber’s load of warheads or one of the 47 cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea. Lest we fail to appreciate the visceral power of our mighty American hand, the final twenty seconds showed one of these $1.41 million Tomahawks (anyone else want to speculate how much good we might do in NYC or Chicago or Indianapolis with $66.27 million? I’m guessing that would pay a lot of teachers and buy quite a few school lunches), with a huge cloud of smoke and steam, blasting out of the launch tube on a US destroyer at night, in a scene worthy of Michael Bay and James Cameron. “We now return you to your regular programming, with Michael Waltrip and Emma Slater doing a samba to ‘Girls In Bikinis’.” (I did not make this up.)
The president himself makes two national addresses on the topic of bombing Syria and going after ISIS or ISIL and he’s semi-apologetic and reluctant about the whole thing, but with the clear subtext of “You sons of bitches were all lined up with pitchforks and garden weasels to crawl up my ass a year ago because I wouldn’t get all up in Syria’s grille, and now I’ve gone full shock and awe on these mothers, so who’s the man now? Huh? You happy yet?”
While we were there anyway, we not only bombed ISIS, who we’ve been assured are basically knocking on the front gate of the White House (much like the guy who made it all the way to the front door without a single shot being fired, let alone a cruise missile), but we saved a couple of tons of high explosive for Khorasan. Excuse me? Come again? Yep, there’s a whole new group of bloodthirsty terrorists who needed a good bombing, and we’d never even heard of them before now. The reason these guys were allegedly on the very cusp of bringing down the American way of life is because they had at long last perfected the underwear bomb…and apparently all our American technology isn’t capable of just detecting boxer and brief bombs at the TSA checkpoint, so the only possible alternative was blowing somebody up before they blew their own balls off.
All of this is being played out before our very eyes, like a hallucinogenic flashback of George W. Bush in 2003. I’d wonder if everyone in Washington, along with every average Joe on Main Street has gone completely mad, but there’s at least one ex-politician who’s seen this movie before and knows how it ends: Dennis Kucinich: Why Are We Bombing Syria? It’s almost enough to give me a shred of hope, except that Kucinich has only a thousand times more chance of stopping this madness that I do…and a thousand times zero is still zero.
BW
Kibbitz Corner 