From the lies surrounding the Spanish-American War to those behind the Vietnam War to those of the absurd manly Republican adventures in Grenada and Panama, America has too often squandered the lives of its youth for the sport of presidents. And from the Bonus Army to Agent Orange to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the Gulf War Syndrome, America has far too frequently abused them a second time, despite their willingness to answer the call.
Major General Smedley Butler (who knew firsthand whereof he spoke, having served, by his own assessment, as a high-ranked military lackey doing the dirty work for corporate robber-barons in Latin America) nailed it when he said, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.”
I like to think that not every war which Americans fought was a scam, though for sure far too many were, and that makes the personal tragedies involved so much more tragic. But other than the fact that (so far) a lot less people have died in Iraq than did in Vietnam, it is unimaginable how this war could be any more tragically wasteful of American (and, far more, Iraqi) lives than it is. And it is unimaginable how an administration could be more contemptuous of those individuals, many of whom choose to serve out of a sheer dedication and patriotism that is completely foreign to cowardly avoiders like Bush and Cheney.
Pat Tillman is the paradigmatic case. By all accounts he was motivated by pure patriotism to sacrifice a career of fame and wealth in order to defend his country after 9/11, and by going to war he knowingly risked sacrificing infinitely more. It was bad enough that he did so only to be killed by friendly fire, though that happens in all wars, and is no doubt usually the result of the best of intentions, if not always the greatest competence.
What cannot be condoned, however, was that he died in Afghanistan fighting a war which his commander-in-chief seems, at best, to have been only vaguely interested in prosecuting, and a lot less than even that once it became possible to instead pursue his pet project in the desert sands of Mesopotamia.
What cannot be condoned is that his president and those around him called upon people like Pat Tillman to fight wars that they wouldn’t fight when it was their turn.
What cannot be condoned is that people like Pat Tillman were turned into props for Karl Rove’s marketing machine, the most cynically bloody political project this side of the 1930s. What cannot be condoned is that his family was lied to about his fate, even while Rove was turning him into a commercial to help move more product.
And what cannot be condoned is that those who were “luckier” than Pat Tillman were cast aside when no longer useful to this gaggle of dark hearts, left to rot with enforced silence in cockroach-infested holding pens, there to begin the looming decades of unalterable suffering, deprivation and frustration which will forever haunt their broken lives.
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