The Wars Without End

According to an article by Thom Shanker which appeared in the New York Times on February 25, 2011, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

Secretary Gates said, "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined', as General MacArthur so delicately put it."

So......This is what Veterans for Peace, The War Resisters League, Military Families Speak Out, etc., have been saying for YEARS.......If the pinheads in the Department of Defense and the White House had listened to us and the millions of people who took the streets before the invasion of Iraq the nearly 6,000 US military men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 100,000 or more who have been have wounded might still be with their families and friends.

And the billions of dollars that the US spends yearly on guns, tanks, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan might have been spent on something worthwhile like healthcare, education, housing, roads, bridges, etc. Last year the US spent $160 billion in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total deficit for the 50 states last year is $130 billion. Do the arithmetic.

But in the United States of Amnesia ...outside of a small circle of friends ..the dead and wounded will be soon forgotten; but surely, the families of the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children who have been killed and wounded....the citizens of those countries that have been destroyed.....they will never forget.