Here is commentary by Major Danny Sjursen:
Numbness or apathy. These seem to be Americans’ go-to responses when each new overseas tragedy unfolds. Recently, it was a bus full of Yemeni children – 40 in fact – killed by a Saudi airstrike that represented one tiny speck of catastrophe in an ongoing U.S.-backed coalition campaign. Sure, the dead kids briefly hit the screens of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC; but let’s be real: no one really cared. We were all too enthralled in the latest White House drama or too sick of politics to even click on the news. Of course, these were foreign, brown, Muslim children – and the dirty secret is they just don’t garner the attention of equally cute American, Caucasian, Christian kids who fall victim to the latest school shooting or terror attack. Let us then call it like it is – the U.S. refuels warplanes, sells bombs, provides intelligence and otherwise enables a Saudi terror campaign that’s killed tens of thousands of civilians, unleashed the world’s worst cholera epidemic in recorded history, and threatens to starve millions of Yemenis.
So that’s Yemen. More than a thousand miles to the east, in distant Afghanistan, (remember that country, you know, where we’ve waged the longest war in our history?) just this week, a US Army Special Forces Sergeant was killed by an IED strike. By one semi-official count, that makes him the 2,414th American to die in the conflict. That not tragic enough for you? How about this: next year, young men and women born after the 9/11 attacks will undoubtedly start patrolling the Hindu Kush and other Afghan locales. And how’s the forever war going? This same week, an increasing invigorated Taliban killed a couple dozen Afghan soldiers and seized a government base. Back in 2011, when I had the inauspicious task of patrolling the Arghandab Valley, the US had some 100,000 troops in the country. We still couldn’t decisively defeat the Taliban. Now, we’ve got about 15,000 soldiers there – think we’re poised for victory now? Does it even matter? Americans will simply yawn.
So that’s Afghanistan. I could go on, of course. We could talk Niger, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, or Pakistan; really any of the disconnected locales where the US military currently fights, kills, or dies. There’s no end in sight folks. It’s not that no one cares to be fair. Brave and idealistic men and women continue to join the service and dedicate years and sometimes careers to achieving some measure of stability in the Mideast. It’s just that no matter how hard the generals try, no matter how late the staff officers work, and no matter how much the enlisted men sweat, there is no indication (the last 17 years being any measure) that Americans are any safer, that the Greater Middle East is any more secure, or that there’s any plausible prospect of victory.
You can read the rest @
https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2018/08/20/dying-for-what-a-tour-of-fruitless-american-killing-and-sacrifice/
It's as if this is all a giant video game - one that lets us enjoy the thrill of killing without the fear of anyone shooting back, and which we can turn off and ignore whenever another thrill-seeking diversion catches our eye.
If THAT is "the American way of life", it's not worth protecting. And we're sure not helping any of the people we're starving, bombing, and shooting.
So, as Danny asks - dying for what?
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