Memories: February 4th, 2015
Some of the topics discussed below are dated now, but the opinions are still the ones I hold about so much of where we as a nation have found ourselves recently on the international stage.
I don’t often comment on many political things these days; I did more often back in 2015. The Iraq War and its repercussions are topics with which I feel I have some level of expertise and experience which qualify me to share my opinions.
“Several sad observations from a liberally-minded ex-military member... I was amused by the response of some liberals who criticized the movie "American Sniper" for not highlighting the wrong-headed premise for going into Iraq in the first place.
As a military member, your job is to do your best to come out alive and to keep your colleagues in arms alive, to the best of your ability, while trying not to cause undue harm to innocents. By the time forces are sent in to fight, it does not make sense to ask a sniper to question the bigger picture in each moment of life or death struggle.
Now we see in Iraq a development that justifies boots on the ground, but due to past choices, we are politically hamstrung, and financially impotent even in Europe, where old-style Russian thinking threatens while leaders have been hiding their heads in the sand.
The lesson of Iraq is one of choosing your battles, and of how choosing the wrong ones can force the hands of politicians and young men and women for generations. We should be fighting ISIS on the ground, but we wouldn't be facing that threat in its current form if we'd just stayed in Afghanistan in 2003.
So much of what we see today in the Middle East could have been circumvented if we would just have had a backbone in our dealings with Israel over their illegal settlements and crimes against humanity aimed unjustly at the Palestinians. We should have supported the protesters in Bahrain. We should have supported the democratic process in Egypt. We should be supporting Ukraine against Russian "separatists."
We should be supporting the US Constitution against domestic enemies, but our military has become irretrievably intertwined with the biggest domestic enemy of the spirit of that sacred document.
A great dichotomy exists in the reality that while we are still a great nation, with amazing potential to do good for ourselves and for humankind, in another disturbingly trivialized sense, the terrorists of 9/11, whether inspired by a misguided view of religion or by covert funding, have won a major victory over the "we" that we once were. If you can't see that, then you aren't paying attention.
End of my soapbox rant for tonight.”
~ as written February 4th, 2015.
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