The question is: Why do we the citizens allow and pay for the war and the atrocities our military has committed in the Middle East for the past 15 years, a hemisphere and two seas from our beaches?

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We are now advised that 250 more American troops are being sent to Syria solely to "advise and assist" the Syrian "people." Translated from propaganda, this means that our military forces in Syria will be increased to a total of.... well, who really knows, and not to include in-country CIA and armed American "contract employees," or the raiding air crews from carriers and nearby land bases. Nor can we be certain which side of the several shooting and gassing each other will our advisers and assisters be "helping."

Seems to me we've heard this song before. Korea comes to mind, and especially Viet Nam, from where 60,000 of our ultimate force in excess of half-a-million "advisers and assistants" were sent back home in wooden crates before we retreated to leave that land to its natives and their conquering masters.

But Syria now becomes only the most recent of our assistance programs in another hemisphere and two seas from our beaches. As a matter of fact a former Secretary of State (putatively our chief Peace Officer) left a trail of destruction and slaughter in her trouser footfalls across North Africa and the Middle East in her endeavors to "advise and assist" the native peoples. And she now campaigns to be our President, i.e. the Commander-in-Chief-of-All-Advisers-and-Assisters.

Can you tell us why do we send our sons -- oops -- and now also our daughters off on these slaughterous missions? What do we get other than possibly a note from a clerk with the authority to use a presidential rubber "regrets" stamp? Someone must be getting some reward for all this. Do you think it could possibly be the moguls and the investors in the weapons, materiel and service businesses attendant to war? Or the politicos whose elections are greased by weapons folks?

Do you suppose it's time for us mere citizens who actually pay for all this and who surrender our sons and daughters to it -- to start thinking about this? Admitting, and then doing something to stop the ignoble, inhumane, beastly practice of slaughter under the banner of advising and assisting?

This writer, this nine-year vet thinks so.

Authors Bio:
Leaving behind a treacherous government now addicted to perpetual war, its limitlessly greedy and power-lusting masters, as well as the retarded albeit smirky Republicans and their evermore clonish Democrat colleagues, a braindead electorate incapable of recognizing its own best interests, the hypocritical Christians who '"support our troops," and the tiresome, sloganeering and feckless activist-hobbyists, as well as those who profit from their plastic morality -- I now repair to my Jungle Home amidst the giant palmettos on a dirt road running east from the Gulf coast that neither the US Mail nor school buses dare assay, and there to gain the more decent and trustworthy company of the indigenous sand tortoises and rattlesnakes.