A military officer points out that the Great Depression 2.0 is not only going to bring the Neocon Wars to an end, but expose the conceit and deceit that served as their foundation.
When it comes down to a choice of spending trillions of American tax dollars to economically transform and police hostile Muslim societies with dysfunctional cultures or funding Medicare and Medicaid, entitlements will win, and the interventions will end.
When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we’ve bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.
It’s too soon to tell, but reductions in defense spending may demonstrate that it’s far less expensive to protect the United States from Islamist terrorism as well as the criminality flooding in from Mexico and Latin America by controlling our borders and immigration. We must, however, stop wasting American blood and treasure on misguided military interventions designed to drag Muslim Arabs and Afghans through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the space of a few years, at gunpoint. They will have to do these things themselves.
Well said and summarized. What a pity that so few ranking members of the American military were willing to speak out about what was always a shamefully stupid series of unnecessary invasions and military occupations doomed to failure. It is somewhat astonishing that the media and politicians are in an uproar over one little girl murdered in Arizona given their complicity in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of little girls that American military forces have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Calling those deaths “collateral damage” doesn’t justify them; one could just as easily justify the Arizona fatalities using the same excuse.