From the recent news reports it seems like the United States is on the verge of engaging in yet another war, this time with Iran.
Why do we have this compulsion?
As far as I can determine, Iran has done nothing to us lately, except allegedly resume developing nuclear weapons after the Trump Administration tore up the multi-national treaty with Iran designed to keep them from developing nuclear weapons.
Say what?!
This is, of course, after we have imposed strangling economic sanctions on Iran, apparently designed to bring that nation to its knees.
Yeah, it appears that we have purposely provoked them into a hostile position, and now our President is publicly threatening them that if they react improperly (i.e. strike back at us), that he is prepared to destroy them.
We’ll teach them who’s Boss.
Gosh, this is deja vu all over again, isn’t it? How many times has this country manufactured a problem, which then justified us to militarily resolve it?
How about “Remember the Maine!”, the manufactured crisis that stimulated the Spanish-American War?
How about the USS Maddox/Gulf of Tonkin fake “attack” on us which paved the way for Lyndon Johnson to (ultimately) send a half-million soldiers to fight the North Vietnamese?
How about the phony crisis in Granada, where Ronald Reagan sent in the U.S. military to crush a civil insurrection in a tiny Caribbean island country? The Heartbreak Ridge movie run-time lasted longer than the “war”.
(By the way, what gives us the right to interfere in another country’s business? We sometimes seem to think that we own the world.)
Of course, we can’t forget the bogus “Weapons of Mass Destruction” excuse for invading Iraq, destroying that country’s infrastructure, and unleashing ISIS upon the Middle East. We’re still over there, trying to extricate us from the cesspool that we created for no reason other than to throw our weight around.
Our current National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was all-in on the WMD charade, back in the day as a hawkish advisor to President Bush. Now, he’s regurgitating the same bile on Iran. He just likes conflict, hates Muslims and Chinese, and thinks the Russians are good guys.
For some reason, America is also intent on permanently pissing off every Muslim in the world by aiding Israel’s master plan of driving every last Palestinian out of their own ancient homeland. It’s the Crusades, revisited, and we’re in on it.
Why do we get ourselves involved in this shit? Don’t we have enough problems of our own, right here in the good old United States? I’m all for making American great again…let’s start right here!
I’ve said this before and will say it again: reinstitute the military draft. Make it mandatory that every young person, even the children of politicians and rich folks, serve a couple of years and face the prospect of having to fight in one of these needless conflicts.
Guess what will happen? Those politicians and rich folks won’t so easily find excuses to support stupid wars. A big problem we have right now is that very few Congressmen and Senators, like our draft-dodging Commander-in-Chief, ever served in the military. And, even fewer of their children have, not surprisingly. Military service is for chumps, they say. “Let the black and brown kids do the fighting!”
Right now, we have a President who, by his nature, likes to bully people and throw his weight around. At the same time, we have a military-industrial complex which needs armed conflict throughout the world to stimulate arms sales. That’s the only plausible explanation for the recent imperative to pick fights with bad actors thousands of miles from the U.S. heartland, in places like Yemen, Venezuela, and sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a volatile mixture.
Now, it appears that America has decided that the government of Iran must fall.
Does anyone remember what happened when the government of Iraq was toppled by the United States? There ensued absolute chaos in the Middle East: a power vacuum that was filled by anarchy, terrorism, and mindless slaughter. We’re still over there, sixteen years later, trying to clean up the mess we made, with no end in sight.
When the shit starts to hit the fan, after Iran is either economically destroyed or lashes out at America for undermining its sovereignty, our clueless citizenry will again, self-righteously, wonder…
Why don’t those Muslim people like us?
