Guest Post by Ron Paul
Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.
Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.
Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.
It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.
That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?
Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.
Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.
Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.
We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.
Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.
Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.
That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.
I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!
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How does any military person, current or past, hold their head up? I remember going to church for many years and the week of veteran’s day, the preacher would ask members of the military to rise so we could all “honor” them. Wow. If I was a current or past soldier, I’d stay seated.
I realize I’ll get a good bit of flak from that comment. It isn’t aimed at the individual soldier. But once you realize you’ve been duped, what do you think you should do?
I feel exactly the same way. To say the military fights to keep America safe is insane and insulting. They are mercenaries, pure and simple.
Since Nam was exposed there is no excuse for being a Smedley Butler. None. You can’t rape the willing. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when the entire country fell for the 911/WMD/Islamaphobia farce and brought back the Rah Rah in the name of democracy rush to the recruiters office.
This may not be viewed favorably, but the shit rolls down hill, i see much blame laid at our leaders feet, deserved, but i see very little introspection by the public, most the public accepts it, continues waving the flag, accepting the lies, pay the taxes funding it. The individual needs to look in the mirror and own it, one way or another. I can only say this because i’ve been in the same boat for many years and woke up.
Exactly. Why didn’t the public protest at the banks? Did they tell the IRS “Hell no we Won’t go”.
I hold my head up because I performed my duties honorably and I served for honorable reasons. I didn’t understand it was all bullshit, because I was lied to by people I trusted. I know my platoon behaved honorably in our theater. Humanely when we could. Bending the commanders intent until it almost broke, if it is what we had to do to save some lives (including our own) and we never backed down from direct action and did plenty of that , because we had to. They never tell us the reasons why they ordered a mission. But some types of missions were taking their toll and so by the second half of the second year all we did was haul the live bodies into the interrogators and sign them over. All I know is that we brought in a lot of “High Value Targets”. Nobody ever told us what they did to deserve that designation. We just had to assume they were plotting to kill us.
Before I went back into the military, I even had an actual Vietnam combat vet (at the time there were not too many around) tell me not to do it. I didn’t listen because I figured this time was different and he couldn’t elucidate the lies to me. I hadn’t even heard of “All war is a racket”, even though it was said by a person whose name frequently came up in cadences.
I would be lying to say there wasn’t some adventure attraction to it. I am not smart enough to learn except by doing. I suppose that has cost me a lot.
Someone near me had big signs out in their yard about their military son and a basket of little flags to take in support. After a week they looked like no one took any and the signs are down.
This is the 1st I’m reading about that poor Afghan family. Six little defenseless children. Cocksuckers!
I’ve never been prouder for abstaining from voting in national elections for the last 3 decades. I want no part-ZERO to do with this evil government.
Horrifying.
Our tax money at work. This is sickening.
That strike was authorized in an urban area surrounded by civilians. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
On a normal day a sensible decision would’ve been made to avoid casualties and call it off due to these assholes hiding among the innocent. Getting innocents killed is bad press for the opposition, so bad guys intentionally do this as SOP.
I recall doing airborne ISR for FOB Loyalty years ago when a car full of knuckleheads ran the street shooting up local market stalls in Sadr City. We called in air support in the form of an Apache and they refused to use force and broke chase halfway through.
No casualties that day, but the knuckleheads got away, drove off to a lot and stored the AKs they were using, then, like good Muslims, drove home to do their prayers before the sun fell.
If you check WickedPedia the part about 2ID being there isn’t mentioned – the writeup conveniently leaves that part out. I left in June, 2007.
Well, they deliberately loosened the standards around what constituted acceptable “collateral damage”.
We can’t have discernment around where we bomb, or the location of civilians and children affecting where our bombs need to go.
Remember, for every bomb not dropped, some poor Raytheon executive gets one less new Mercedes.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m physically sickened by people asking God to bless the USSA. He ought to do everything but. Thankfully He is a very gracious and longsuffering God and His ways are not our ways.
Romans 5:20-21 KJB… “Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.”
For the chorus of graceless religionists who will chime in with “your grace is just license to sin” mental midgetry; I add nothing other than what Paul has already added…
Romans 6:1-2 KJB… “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?”
Starting to feel so incompetent that it must be on purpose.
For what nefarious purpose is everyone’s guess. (Collapse the US to start the [Western] New World Order? Who knows for sure.)
Another ‘collateral murder’.