I came across this article: Terrorism, A Matrix of Lies and Deceit. It made me think about what we’re doing as a nation and as a world. We have a “war on terror” that is obviously not working. Bush started it 15 years ago, and terrorism is worse now than ever before. Clearly, doing the same going forward isn’t going to produce better results.
Seriously, we need to stop the nonsense. We need to stop bombing people. If we just stopped and refused to send military units to other countries for a decade or two, the youth in those countries would not grow up hating us. We would not be killing their fathers and obliterating their cities and infrastructures. They could grow up doing their own things. Why would they bother inciting war and jihad? They’d be busy living and feeding their children. We’d be busy spending all that military money on infrastructure right here at home.
We’d all be busy living, not busy dying.
Granted, it would take some years before the effects would be visible. It would take real leadership and consistency. Our election cycle of four or eight years is not long enough to implement a sensible strategy against a violent world.
During the GOP debate, the candidates blasted the Obama administration for decimating the military. “Smallest Navy since 1915, smallest Army since 1940, least number of airplanes.” They brought this forth in the context of “fighting ISIS.”
The implications are that somehow our military having less ships is the reason ISIS has arisen and gained ground.
They took these numbers from senator Lindsey Graham, who said that under sequestration, the military was cut “down to the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1915.” He is right about the numbers. The Navy had 231 ships in 1915, and will have 234 in 2019. The Army will have 440,000 troops in 2019, which is the smallest since before World War II.
However, the comparison does not make sense and is not really fair. We also have fewer horses and bayonets than ever. Our capabilities have grown immensely through technology in the last few decades. We should compare how our military stands up against other nations. I simply do not believe that the number of ships, airplanes and soldiers we have has in any way contributed to the results in the Middle East.
President Obama pulled out of Iraq and partly Afghanistan because the American people wanted him to. I still want that today. And I might also add that the “sequestration” fiscal strategy that forced Obama’s hand regarding the military budget was not Obama’s idea, but that of the Republican-controlled Congress. Congress decides how much money gets allocated to the various departments, not the president. The president then just spends it. Blaming Obama for the small military therefore makes no sense.
Finally, I believe that, just like small government is good government, a smaller military is a good military, as long was we continue to advance technologically. Boondoggles like the F-35 fiasco do not go along with that philosophy, however, but that’s a subject for another day.
Here is a video of a German language slam poem with a powerful impact. There are no English versions that I could find. The title is Behind Us My Country. If you know German, you must listen to every word. If you don’t know German, you should play a minute or so to get the cadence of the poem, and how the two speakers alternate.
Below is my translation. You can see the speaker on the right and the one on the left. Both tell their stories.
This is a powerful explanation of the complex sentiments of Germans toward refugees, that an American will likely not be able to understand.
But it rings true for me personally, as I am the son of a refugee myself and as my entire life, the person I am, is shaped in many ways by the experiences of my father who often might have said himself: Behind Us My Country.
Behind Us My Country
Everything I am was born there
Everything that was home to me
The square, where we children played
The smile of my first love
The apple tree in our park
And the little lake hidden behind the mountain
The hot tea on the tin tray
Creased story tellers
Laugh wrinkles decorate their faces
Chattering on the way home from school
Night was until the parents slept and then out again
The squeaking bicycle of my brother
The poems of Rudas
And the smell of wet lawn
Radios that despite tortured tuning still carry out the melodies
The singing of my sister in the morning
My mother, my mother with her eternal money worries
And I don’t know why: Ladybugs
All that was my home
All that way once my home
But I could not stay anymore
Behind us the war
The fresh grave of my parents
The last clump of dirt is still rolling off
It hasn’t found it final spot yet
So fresh is my mourning
And nothing has been digested
I could not stay any longer
The spoke of us as the living dead
Our people forced into trains that slid along in the smoke of the locomotives
Our doors smashed
Shopping windows in shards
Our parents intimidated, our siblings abuse
Cruel news from friends that were still there
Most had disappeared
It was impossible to stay, not another day
The next step in my city is the last step in my country
And the worst step then onto this rusty boat
Next we turn, then we hold on, and then it will sink
Turned over to the sea
In the ocean, without consolation
The moon hides behind the clouds
The night so dark, you see nothing
For hours, nothing
And when I close my eyes in the dark
I hear the voice of my mother
Around us the lord is only the sea
As if our boat was the heart of all things
I open my eyes and gaze toward the sky
Prayers are our sails
Life vests will take over the rest
But the hope they cannot carry
A man swims toward me
Here, take him, I can’t go on anymore
He is one year old and his name is Berstin
His father slides out of the vest into the eternal dark blue
That’s how I became father the first time
In the ocean
He handed him to me
The man in the vest gave me his inheritance
Arrived in exile, I learned quickly
the most important words are permit to day, sorry, and thank you
Arrived in exile I saw a family reunited after a long time
How the father wimpered out of good luck
Deep from inside with the shame of a man who seldom cries
I followed that family step by step
But only with my gaze
Arrived in exile
But the earth of home comes along on the soles of our feet
I am from there, and I have memories
I was born like people are born
I have a mother that loves me
And it breaks my heart
In the letters that she writes I can see how meanwhile her hand has a tremor
When I say homesick, I say dream
Because the old home hardly exists any longer
Do we stay here, do we become beach again?
Not quite sea, not quite land
Do we stay here, we become beach again.
Not quite sea, not quite land
Arrived in exile, a man welcomes me
The other waves foreign flags
Sometimes one feels the love, sometimes one feels the hate
They look at your head scarf
They look into my passport
But don’t be angry, forgive them
They forget the love, they forgot the love
I wish them peace
On the contrary, show them, stand up
Tear off our legs and we walk on our hands
Tear off our legs and we walk on our hands
We will make the best of our lives until our lives end
The GOP candidates keep talking about how our military is “deflated” and insinuate that that’s the reason ISIS exists.
What nonsense. ISIS’ existence has many sources, but our lack of fighter planes, technology, aircraft carriers, ships, guns and ammunition, if there even were such a lack, has nothing at all to do with it.
ISIS exists because of policy decisions by Bush and Obama, not because of anything the military did or did not do, or could or could not do.
ISIS exists because Bush purposely and thoughtlessly invaded Iraq, destabilized a nation and toppled a dictator that we understand in retrospect held together the Middle East. ISIS exists because Obama pulled out the military, following the wishes of the majority of Americans. If he had not done that, many thousands more of American soldiers would now be dead. ISIS exists because Obama and Clinton destabilized Libya and helped topple Qaddafi. ISIS exists because Syria became a failed state.
The “solutions” the GOP candidates propose, if those can even be called solutions, are more gasoline on the fire, nothing else. After toppling several dictators, they want to topple another one, Assad. Cruz wants to carpet bomb “them” whoever “them” is. Trump wants to bomb them into oblivion. Rubio wants “more military.” Great stuff.
Let me say this:
If we had left Saddam Hussein alone in 2003, he would still be there, or his sons would be there, tyrannizing the Iraqi people, but the region would be “stable” and there would be no ISIS. Oil would be cheap. Thousands of American soldiers would not be dead, and tens of thousands of soldiers would not have lost arms and legs, and would not be suffering from PTSD. We would have two trillion dollars less debt – at least. We could have written checks for $6,250 instead to every one of the 320 million Americans, men, women, children and infants.
And rather than stopping all this insanity in other countries, our “leaders” want to do more of it.
This is all so wrong! Do we not see? Do we not learn?
I found this gem on my Facebook feed today. It seems to me we are massively generalizing and spreading hate toward one group of people in retaliation for crimes of others of that group. This has been done many times before, against nations, or religions, or ethnic groups or races throughout human history. It has never ended well.
It was a horrible crime what happened in 2001, and it deserved retaliation. We retaliated, and in the process changed world history, probably for the worse. But it needed to be done.
How much retaliation is enough?
The United States has dropped 23,144 bombs in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia in 2015 alone. We will never know how many people were destroyed by these bombs. Not all bombs hit anything or anyone. Some bombs hit hundreds of people at once. For every dead person, there are dozens of loved ones who lose their father and breadwinner, and their lives are also destroyed, even though they get to go on living.
If only one person per bomb died in these six countries, it would be over 23,000 people dead. I cannot believe that all 23,000 people that died from these bombs alone were guilty. Many were innocent children, born long after 2001.
And this was only 2015. How many bombs did we drop in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014? Can anyone count them?
When will we be done retaliating? I would guess we have killed or caused the deaths of 1,000 people for every person that died in 2001. By sending our soldiers into these wars we have caused more deaths of our soldiers alone than people died on 9/11. Are we just going to keep bombing countries forever now?
First Bush spent seven years destabilizing the Middle East. Then Obama spent seven years trying to get out of the mess. Bush was successful in destabilizing. Obama was unsuccessful getting out of it. It hasn’t worked at all. The Taliban now control more of Afghanistan than at any time since October 2001. Iraq is in shambles and in control of an Islamic Fundamental Terror group, a bunch of religious nutcases. Does anyone understand that it’s not working? Both countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, have a million people dead and are worse off now than they were in 2001.
Perhaps, only perhaps, if we stopped shooting at people, they would stop shooting at us, and they would get bored of hating us?
I don’t see how stirring up the American public to hate Muslims is going to solve this problem.
For 1,400 years we have been slaughtering one another, just because one of us prays one way and another prays a different way.”
— Shams Bandar
Saudi born singer Shams Bandar announces that she is renouncing her Saudi and Kuwaiti nationalities. She thinks that the Arabs need to stop blaming the west for their problems.
In January of 2013, I wrote this post about U.S. Military spending. Most of the numbers and basic facts, as well as my suggestions on what to cut still stand today, three years later (the numbers used here are for 2014). However, there are some developments that I should point out:
[IISS – click for image credit]The U.S. military spending has gone down from $711 billion to $581 billion, if I can take the two different sources as valid and make an apples-to-apples comparison. China’s has gone down a bit, also. Russia is about the same, and so are most of the other nations. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia has doubled its spending during those years and risen to slot number 3 with $80 billion.
I put these numbers in a chart ranking the top ten military spenders in the world.
The U.S. still spends more than the next NINE COUNTRIES COMBINED on the military, yet the population of the U.S. (321 million) is about one tenth of that of all those countries combined (3.1 billion). So overall we’re spending more than 10 times as much per capita as every other country in the world on the military. And this is AFTER all the “terrible” cuts by Obama.
Interestingly, with the rise of Saudi Arabia in this chart, they are above our ranking in spending per capita. The U.S. does about twice the spending of the major European nations per capita, about four times that of Russia and 18 times that of China.
When I listen to the Republican candidates during the debates, they are ripping into the current administration for slashing the military budget and destroying our military capability.
Really?
Are they telling me that it takes ten times the spending per capita of the next nine countries combined to defend our country?
Are we getting that much less value for our spending than China and Russia?
Seriously?
Or are we just spending stupidly, to use a Trump term?
Perhaps we should stop spending our military money in other countries. We’re not defending the United States and its citizens. We’re blowing money on the military industrial complex which has a vested interest in wars going on overseas all the time.
We are fanning the flames of terrorism on purpose. We’re killing innocent civilians and children by the scores with our drones. And at home we’re telling the voters that we have to be afraid of terrorists killing us.
A few days ago this image showed up on my Facebook feed, and I shared it.
When you shoot people, they will try to shoot back.
Not many governments have the huge resources available required to deploy drones. The United States is one of the few. If you want a better understanding of our drone program in form of a movie, watch Good Kill and get yourself shocked.
Our drones are killing machines, doomsday robots we only knew in science fiction movies a few decades ago, that descend out of nowhere, unheard, unseen, and shoot missiles. We have documented cases where the United States has shot missiles into wedding parties, killing dozens of innocent people, women and children, because there was a terrorist in their midst.
We also have a policy to “double tap” which means we shoot another missile into the aftermath of the first one. Since the rescuers on the ground know that, they don’t go into the original death scene and this ensures that the wounded there are slowly dying in agony with bystanders watching from a distance, unable to help or risk their own lives.
This is war at its very, very worst.
Do we think that a young boy who sees his mother, his father, his siblings murdered this way, might be inclined to join the jihad and fight the people on the other side of the planet that send killer robots their way? You bet. I am sure I would too if I were that boy and an American killer robot had blown away my mom and dad.
People Bomb You. You Get Angry. You Bomb People.
This bombing is done by the American government. Our president orders it. He does it in the name of the American people, in my name, with my tax dollars.
A Saudi man was sentenced to death basically for being an atheist. The link below for The Guardian provides more detail.
The religious police first detained Fayadh in August 2013 after receiving a complaint that he was cursing against Allah and the prophet Muhammad, insulting Saudi Arabia and distributing a book of his poems that promoted atheism. Fayadh said the complaint arose from a personal dispute with another artist during a discussion about contemporary art in a cafe in Abha.
Here is a regime that is extremely rich due to the oil bonanza in the Middle East. The United States supports this repressive (almost medieval) regime. Here is the link to the Saudi embassy web site.
What kind of country must kill those that don’t subscribe to its official religion? Christian countries did this for centuries. Muslim countries have always done it and are still doing it now.
And we stand by and watch and sell them F-35 fighter planes.
I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now. I think that was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States.
— Bernie Sanders during the Debate
I agree that our decision to invade a strong country in the middle of the Middle East and completely removing its government, infrastructure and power structure created many vacuums on the political, religious, ideological and societal levels. Leaders of all types filled the vacuums, and it will take decades before things shake out and settle down.
I hate to say this, but Iraq needs a dictator. Unfortunately, guys like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Mao don’t come around too often, so we’ll just have to wait until one emerges.
Perhaps we can send Dick Cheney to Iraq to fill that role? But it would have been so much cheaper to leave Saddam Hussein there!
What is it with our Republican candidates for president? Most of them appear to be tripping over themselves wanting to shoot down Russian planes.
You shoot them down, absolutely. Whatever happens next, we deal with it.
— Ben Carson
Lindsey Graham, who has no chance in hell to get nominated, still loves wars:
I would shoot [Putin’s] planes down, I would literally shoot his planes down.
— Lindsey Graham
Then there is Chris Christie:
We spent untold American treasure and blood to eliminate the Soviet Union. We should not let it come back.
— Chris Christie
Carly Fiorina said she’d never talk to Putin, right after she bragged she had actually met him before. Then:
I think we must be prepared to shoot down Russian jets.
— Carly Fiorina
Are these people insane? They want to start World War III for idiotic reasons like a no fly zone in Syria?
I wonder if these people actually read the recent studies comparing our boondoggle F-35 planes to Russian fighters of the current generation? Here is an article that shows Russia’s superiority: Outgunned by the Su-30 family of aircraft and suffering critical design flaws, the American F-35 is staring down the barrel of obsolescence – and punching a gaping hole in western air defences. Based on this, I am not so sure it’s a smart idea to shoot at Russian planes.
Donald Trump is the only one with some common sense. When asked about Russia in Syria, the said:
I am all for it, 100%
— Donald Trump
His position is to let the Russians do their thing and keep us out of the quagmire.
I am saying it again. Trump actually appears attractive among all those lunatics who want to be president of the United States.
The F-35 program is the most expensive weapons system of all time. The planes cost around $200 million each. The plane is also very controversial. Here is a post I wrote some time ago about how even the experts agree that the plane does not perform the way it was designed.
The plane is rumored to have serious flaws, including less maneuverability than older planes that we already have. Donald Trump said recently that he would scrap the F-35 program if elected.
When they say that this cannot perform as well as the planes we already have, what are [we] doing, and why are we spending so much more money?
This is the first time I have to admit I’d actually line up behind Trump. The F-35 program is a program of redistribution of wealth – from the taxpayers (the American middle class) to Lockheed Martin.
It should be stopped. Apparently America’s fire power would not be diminished, but the wallet would have lots of money left over.
If you want to degrade and defeat the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Khorasan group, the al-Qaeda element… in northern Syria, you are going to have to have a ground force.
Seriously, are we even talking about putting soldiers on the ground in Syria? This is reckless and stupid beyond belief.
When we put soldiers in Afghanistan, at least we had the cooperation of the anemic government and supposedly its people, and we had one clearly defined enemy.
When we invaded Iraq, we had a clear objective of toppling the dictator, and then “build a nation on the principles of democracy.” A fairly clear enemy and mission.
Look how successful we have been in these two nations in the last 14 and 12 years! We spent more than a trillion dollars, the countries are demolished and we’re no closer to stable government than before. However, there are a LOT MORE TERRORISTS now in both of those countries. They are petri dishes of terrorism.
We have failed miserably.
The American tax payer got nothing out of those initiatives. The country paid dearly. Thousands of American soldiers died. Tens of thousands were maimed for life. Families and lives were destroyed.
All. For. Nothing.
And now, we’re seriously thinking about doing this again? We are putting soldiers into another Middle Eastern country, into an ongoing conflict, where we can’t even figure out who exactly the enemy is and what we’re trying to get done there! And the Russians are already stirring that pot, too? What’s America got to do with it?
President Obama is sending “less than 50” U.S. Special Forces into Syria. That’s boots on the ground, and in contrast what he just proclaimed he would not so not too long ago.
Syria is in a mess of a civil war. The Russians are dropping bombs on behalf of the teetering Assad regime. ISIS is beheading people in the name of God. The rebels are going after ISIS and Assad. Iran is messing with things.
All we can possibly achieve is getting more Americans killed – for nothing. Don’t tell me we are doing this to keep our country safe. Don’t tell me we are doing this so I can have my freedom. Really, what are 50 American soldiers in Syria going to accomplish?
There is no solution to this mess. Therefore we should distance ourselves. Let the Russians spend their money that they don’t have. We should not be posturing.
Syria is country whose people are fleeing. Their president is a coward who is willing to allow millions of his citizens to lose their livelihoods and their homeland. He is willing to sacrifice his people’s lives so he can stay in power. He should have resigned and gone into exile with his pile of money years ago and left his people alone.
People are not there to serve their presidents. Rather, presidents are there to serve their people.
Assad is willing to drag the world through the morass with him. He does not get it.
