Poor Historical Hindsight Availed U.S. Less Than Nothing--It's Citizens Suffer --The War Corporations Prevail

The Republicans say we have spent "only" 1-percent of our GDP on the foreign war on terror. Dems say we have spent money we don't have, a "bank breaking" 20-percent of our budget. I say we haven't done it right in the first war we started and we've done too much in the second, both for too long, and all in the name of defeating terrorism while creating it; as failure to kill it only makes it stronger. Of course, all of this assumes the original source of terrorism was not a direct product of our corporate-owned military industrial complex's unquenchable thirst for higher profits and power.

Admittedly, now that the US is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously and this alone has spread us unworkably thin. Many say the real question is not whether we can win on both fronts or either; it is whether we should have been there in the first place in an enduring way.

If we truly believed Al Qaida was responsible for 9/11, I guess the removal of the Taliban was a good idea. After all, they were a government of a sovereign nation that supported a terrorist organization that attacked another nation. Foreign wars are against nations. When you get into occupying a nation and doing the job of its government for them, you are only asking for trouble.

If it was right for us to fight a war in either country to establish regime change, it doesn't mean it was our right to manage them afterwards. We are not supposed to be an empire. Frankly, neither we nor any other empire has succeeded. They eventually spread too thin, failing to win the "hearts and minds" of the conquered; they become distracted from their internal affairs and service to their people and they squander their resources. Meanwhile, corporations of war make record profits on the backs of the working people and on the deaths of our soldiers.

No one seems to be willing to face the hard facts that the US was arrogant to think they could manage the internal conflict of a complex culture any better than they could. Yes, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were vicious governments. Yes, we were helpful to remove them from office. But we were wrong to assume we were the ones to stay and make their decisions for them knowing nothing about their cultures.

The people of Afghanistan and Iraq would have thanked us for simple regime change and a warning that any similar regime would face removal if they too failed to manage their people in a way that kept them from attacking other countries.