US military man in unknown territory
Read William J. Astore's brilliant piece, "The Superpower That Fought Itself--And Lost Out Everywhere And Winning Nowhere" [1] . It's a must read.
Here's a short synopsis: "The world's greatest military" is..."overstretched"...proxy armies in Iraq and Afghanistan unreliable often delivering American- provided weaponry to black markets and into the hands of various enemies" and "all of this and more coming at a time when defense spending is once again soaring and the national security state is awash in funds to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year."
"After 16 years of a never-ending, ever-spreading global war on terror...the globe's 'last superpower' is in never-ending set of conflicts with a range of minor enemies...America's can-do military...has increasingly become a can't-do one".
Astore goes into great detail of the US being "Everywhere and Winning Nowhere".
And that's because "winning" conflicts isn't necessary to the "deep state"-most of which it initiated- forces reigning in America and attempting to exercise hegemony-"full spectrum dominance"-over the world. It doesn't care about winning or losing, the expansion of terrorism and the resultant recruitment of more terrorists, the killing of innocents-collateral damage-hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from their war torn countries or even the US military men and women losing their lives in futile battles for they are just cannon fodder to the sociopaths that put them in harm's way.
Winning isn't necessary as the "deep state" thrives on unending world conflict as it's necessary to feed the ravenous maw of the military/security complex. As former CIA official John Stockwell put it, "It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms".
Go back to the 1930's and read the words of former Marine Major General Smedley Butler who said, "War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of the time as high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." He had come to realize he was just a complicit enabler for big corporate interests.
And what of us Americans today? Are we not cannon fodder to the "deep state", propagandized and indoctrinated as Stockwell says, "to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms".
Of course we don't see ourselves as cannon fodder. We're the "exceptional people of the indispensible country", go to war to bring "freedom and democracy" and our Navy is "A force for good".
We Americans are a shackled bunch, not so much shackled with iron chains on our legs, but in our minds. Arundhati Roy said of Americans, "They swallow the propaganda so obediently".
Too many Americans believe our propaganda myths "from sea to shining sea", America the beautiful, the "American dream", our wars are just and our motives pure.
Too many won't allow themselves to see the deep state can't be reformed. It is completely unredeemable, its tentacles imbedded in all our institutions public and private. It must be removed root and branch before its sinister machinations destroy us and the rest of the world.
It's that bad folks. There's no getting around it.
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