Our National Disgrace

Recently, I had the pleasure of spending time with a friend who is an ex-Marine. This man turned down a scholarship to an Ivy League university and instead opted to serve his country in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was deployed to Somalia, and was stationed there during the Black Hawk Down incident. He later served a tour in Iraq and a tour in Afghanistan. I am very proud to know him. To the best of my knowledge, he suffered no long-term physical injury. While I am not professionally qualified to judge, it seems to me that, emotionally and psychologically, he is very well-adjusted. Considering the circumstances, I believe him to be one of the “lucky” ones.

Unfortunately, thousands of other current and former servicemen are not nearly as “lucky”. Beyond the thousands of young men and women who have given their lives, there are thousands more who literally gave parts of their bodies. Among those fortunate enough to return physically unscathed, there are thousands who bear the horrible emotional and psychological scars from their experience.  I know that there are some wonderful, private organizations trying to help these people. I suspect that the Veterans Administration at least does a decent job of dealing with the physical injuries suffered. I firmly believe our federal government as a whole has done a horrible job of addressing the emotional and psychological damage suffered and the concomitant problems these people face in adapting to life back home. I also believe that precious little is being done to prepare and help the families of these soldiers after their tours. This is an absolute disgrace – one that is completely ignored by our politicians in this election cycle.

As if this weren’t bad enough, what these people have endured was completely unnecessary, and the direct result of political fool’s errands. These fool’s errands were based on one man’s desire for revenge, and another man’s desire for war profiteering to benefit his cronies. To think that we could somehow impose, directly or indirectly, a democracy on Iraq was sheer lunacy from the beginning. I don’t have a graduate degree in history, but, unlike George W. Bush, I actually paid attention in high school. I know that the nation of Iraq is an artificial construct developed by the victors after World War One. Iraq, as we know it, was never suited to be a nation-state of any kind. With a populace comprised of Sunni and Shiite Arabs who detest each other, as well as Kurds who bear no ethnic relation to the Arabs, this area can never be an area of peaceful coexistence under one roof.  I’ll at least give credit to Joe Biden for recognizing this, and proposing a “tri-state solution” in 2008.

That’s where my credit to Joe Biden ends. When Biden and Obama say we’ll be out of Afghanistan in 2014, they are willfully lying to the American public. We’ll be there for many years to come, as will we be in Iraq. This is another exercise in futility. I never expected George W. Bush to know about the British experience in Afghanistan, but I admit I expected him to be somewhat knowledgeable about the Soviet experience there. Obama and Biden should know better, as I consider them to be somewhat smarter than Bush. The hope that we can somehow prop up any kind of centralized government (with or without Karzai) is sheer lunacy. This area is another nation-state that should never have been. These are tribal people whose fealty will always be to a tribal chief, and never to any kind of centralized government. Our mission there is completely wrong-headed.

How can people with no sense or understanding of history be allowed to lead us into these quagmires? For that matter, how can they get elected to high office? If Romney gets elected, how long do you think it will be before we deploy brave men and women into the Straits of Hormuz, because, for some reason, “it’s in our national interest”? How many of Romney’s sons will see action over there? I’m sick to death of hearing talk about “getting tough” from men who received multiple draft deferments.

This entire situation is a national disgrace. The bigger disgrace is that no one is talking about it.