Support our
troops. It�s the only rallying cry left. It�s the dirty, shredded little yellow
ribbons and tattered flags that used to mean nationalistic pride and now
nobody�s really up to replacing them and, since it�s impossible to agree on
much of anything about the Iraq invasion, occupation and subsequent unmitigated
disaster, we�re all supposed to at least agree to �support our troops.�
And of course it
was invoked yet again by our Democratic "leadership" the last month
as they caved in their customary ignominious fashion. Hell, they're only the
majority party; what could they possibly do? But I've got bigger issues on my
mind today.
Personally, I
don't support the troops; never have; don�t have the flag-waver gene.
The few drops of
residual patriotism I had left from childhood have long since evaporated,
victims of decades of watching the ruling class do its perpetual hatchet job on
the rest of world, with the gleeful and well-paid assistance of whomever's in
political power, using the US military and its black ops zealots to fight proxy
wars solely to expand corporate America's bottom line -- over and over and over
again, from Indonesia to Iran; from Chile to Greece; from Nicaragua to Grenada.
The list of US
meddling in other countries� affairs is depressingly long and shares one
consistent attribute: In all cases, the US has intervened against national
liberation movements that advocate land reform, reestablishment of public
services, reversing the damage wrought by the IMF and World Bank
"privatization" sledgehammer, redistributing elites� wealth and
nationalizing their conglomerates and/or land holdings, and so on toward a more
humanitarian and egalitarian era. But Uncle Sam has other priorities.
Rather than
siding -- even once -- with the good guys, the US always comes down on the side
of bloody dictatorships with a predictable record of murder, torture and
"disappearing" members of the opposition, and who embrace the kind of
rapacious capitalism that's the organizing economic principle in the continual
transfer of the lower 95 percent�s rapidly dwindling wealth to the numbered
accounts of the upper 5 percent. That�s what �our troops� do when they�re not
otherwise busy committing genocide in the Middle East.
To the raging
murderous madmen running this administration, the "troops" are just
interchangeable killing machines whose sole purpose is spreading terror and
carnage throughout yet another country of little brown people with the rotten
luck to be sitting atop America�s oil -- and which offers a good chance of
rapid conquest, since we have no stomach for a fair fight.
The Lancet
recently reported a study of the arithmetic of mass slaughter that suggests
about 655,000 Iraqis have been murdered by "our troops" in any of
dozens of grisly ways -- lined up and executed, bombed to pieces,
"accidentally" wiped out at some wedding party or farmers market, slaughtered
by grenades or surface-to-surface hand-held rockets, crushed under demolished
buildings (with schools and hospitals favored targets), randomly shot on their
way to or from work (what little work is left in a ruined country with almost
no functioning infrastructure) or, perhaps saddest of all, executed because
they're of the wrong Islamic sect, victims of a sectarian and class war
"our troops" unleashed and will continue while hundreds of thousands
more die because one idiot's version of Allah is said to be better than some
other idiot's version. For nearly five years and counting, the presence of �our
troops� has been unrelentingly disastrous for the former country of Iraq, now a
bombed-out moonscape of craters and ancient ruins, with no room left to even
bury all the bodies.
And we're not
talking about some little jerkwater country with no real identity or reason for
continued existence. We're talking about the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace
of writing, where plants and animals were first domesticated and where farming
first competed with and then replaced the hunter-gatherer model. From there,
this "package" of domesticated grains and herd animals spread east
and west, changing the way people obtained food, creating food surpluses through
agriculture, which then allowed the growth of non-food producing classes like
scribes and artisans and, unfortunately, a warrior class -- modern US
representatives of which stood by and watched as rioters looted or destroyed
irreplaceable artifacts dating back more than 8,000 years, some of the oldest
human creations anywhere in the world.
The ancient
Mesopotamians probably had debates about "supporting the troops" back
then, some resenting the fact that the warrior class spent its time sharpening
spears and pikes while most of the rest of organized society did the
back-breaking work that produced food for the spear-sharpeners. But as usual,
you can imagine the right-wingers winning the debate by manufacturing some
external threat that, if left unchecked, would overrun their (town, hamlet,
village, agrarian community, etc.) and eliminate their cherished freedoms,
commit murder and mayhem, rape their women and steal their animals, and
generally turn the cradle of civilization into just another sorry disorganized
large-scale slum.
But back to the
theme: This stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. The primary, and perhaps only,
objective of American foreign policy since the late 18th century has been to
negotiate diplomatic solutions to issues of tariffs, trade, border disputes,
preservation of peace (or temporary lack of war) -- with the advancement of US
business interests always, always, always the only real objective of US
diplomats, and with the US military ready and willing to act as the enforcement
arm of the US corporate agenda -- the hired muscle coming in from the Jersey
side.
And that works
some of the time, although there's a huge difference between deploying troops
as a final, desperate measure and gleefully shipping them around the world to
whatever flashpoint happens to need a little more fuel so it can erupt into the
traditional mass murder crime scene we've all come to equate with the end game
of American foreign policy.
But "our
troops" aren't innocents. They're not particularly stupid; rather, they're
representative of the range of intelligence and political awareness found in
the general population. They are poorer than the US average for adult men in
their age range, which makes them more susceptible to promises of economic
betterment through the practice of socially sanctioned murder. And they're far
more gung ho than the average American. They tend to believe that "Army of
One" crap, as well as the ads for technical skills training.
They also tend
to believe the doctrinal American creation myth, which ignores the mass
slaughter of native peoples, minimizes the effects of slavery on the slaves,
justifies vicious expansionism with the phrase "Manifest Destiny,"
and, most importantly, hides the naked aggression with which US imperialism
deals with the rest of the world behind positive though nonsensical concepts
like "spreading freedom," "exporting the American dream,"
"preventing the spread of (insert current despised social system
here)" and "making the world safe for democracy."
And who gets to
do all this spreading and exporting that our bottomless arrogance tells us the
world is salivating for? The troops we're supposed to be supporting.
Somebody has to
pull the trigger, align the bomb sites, push the button, rotate the tank
turret, hide the Semtex, ambush the wedding party, fuel the jets, chauffer the
latest four-star yes-man, maneuver the Blackhawks into position for the kill,
and generally try to screw up anything they can get their hands around or
weapons sights locked on.
Somebody's got
to keep volunteering to keep doing BushCo's killing for them. Somebody's got to
sign the paperwork and step across that line so some cheese-ball recruiter can
get his bonus. Somebody's got to disable their conscience long enough for one
more amoral trip to the killing fields. Somebody's got to scream, "SIR,
YES SIR," when another demented drill sergeant questions the shine of
their boots or the maintenance of their weapon.
Without
"our troops," BushCo's adventuring would be impossible. Without
"our troops," BushCo would have to farm the whole thing out to
Blackwater.
They used to
say, "It's not just a job; it's an adventure." Well, it's not an
adventure, either. The job description of any member of the US military
anywhere in the world is, simply: "Kill or be killed at the whim of The
Commander Guy." Any nonsense about building character or preparation for
life in the technical world is just lying hogwash designed to lure more suckers
into the gears of the world's most grisly mass murder machine.
And here�s the really
sick thing: the higher the US body count, the faster the Iraq disaster will
end. War must have serious real-world consequences if it's to penetrate the
slack-jawed narcolepsy of TV-ravaged Americans. Flag-draped coffins � or
�transfer tubes,� as the Department of Official Bubbly Happy Talk has dubbed
them -- tend to do that job rather well.
Comments?
Email the author at war_on_peas@yahoo.com
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