Two of those killed in Iraq this year died at the hands of Iraqis who were furious that Trump had killed prominent Iraqi general Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in a drone strike on Baghdad on January 3, when he assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. The Iraqi parliament in 2018 recognized the paramilitary al-Muhandis led as part of a National Guard, so he was an officer of the Iraqi state. Trump's notion that he could make war on part of the Iraqi military while using US troops to train and support another part is the craziest policy anyone could have come up with. It is directly responsible for two US troop deaths this spring.
Contemplating these nearly 7,000 military deaths, I feel profound sorrow. The majority of them did not need to die. They were not defending the United States. Iraq in 2003 was a poor ramshackle country with no Air Force and not the slightest ability to harm the US. Figures in the Bush administration, including the now-sainted Colin Powell, hinted broadly that then Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein had had a hand in 9/11. It was the Big Lie, worse than any of the 18,000 Donald J. Trump has told in office.
Worst of all, the United States committed all these trillions of dollars and thousands of servicemen's lives (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans and others, including innocent noncombatants), to the wrong struggle. A small, lean, counter-terrorism operation could have dealt with the al-Qaeda threat. There would have been no ISIS had the US not waged an illegal war of aggression on Iraq.
On Memorial Day, we have nearly 100,000 dead in the coronavirus pandemic and 38 million abruptly unemployed, we have entire US industries hanging on by a thread. For the past 20 years Washington has been pointing its big guns out across the Atlantic toward the Middle East and Central Asia in the "Global War on Terror," spending trillions of dollars and substantial blood countering a tiny network of seedy terrorists and glorying in the acquisition of new spheres of geopolitical interest. Those were our Aqaba artillery. The real threats lay inside the realm, threats of skyrocketing inequality, rising white supremacist extremism, and a Neoliberalism that dismantled public goods like health care for narrow private profit.
Ironically, some states, like Washington, are turning to their National Guard to do contact tracing and to urge individuals exposed to the virus to quarantine. This activity is not without risk. God bless them, and may they win this truly essential war.
Bonus Video:
King 5: "National Guard calling those who may have coronavirus"
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