[Peace-discuss] (no subject)

Mon Feb 4 15:51:34 UTC 2013

News, Community, Action
The hypocrisy of gun control during the War on Terror
 What nation can intentionally target children for death and still expect to win the hearts and minds? All the deaths, torture and wasted treasure was bad enough, but this is simply beyond the pale.

   "It kind of opens our aperture," said Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. "In addition to looking for military-age males, it's looking for children with potential hostile intent."
Children. Children!
  It sort of puts those school shooting deaths in perspective, doesn't it?
   While we debate saving the lives of children with gun control here in The States, we are treating them as combatants overseas.
   Am I the only one that feels like my brain is going to explode from the contradictions here? 

  Lost in the debate about gun control in America is the fact that we are by far the largest gun trafficker in the world.

   the US actually tripled its arms sales last year, hitting a record high, and cornering almost 78 per cent of the global arms trade.
We have a near monopoly in the world's arms trade. We are literally flooding the world with guns!  It exposes any effort at domestic gun control as total hypocrisy. 
By definition that makes us the greatest threat to world stability and peace.
    When did America's morals stop at the border?

Back to the Global War

  Pop-quiz time: In which nation did 200 Marines begin armed operations last September?

a) Afghanistan
b) Pakistan
c) Iran
d) Somalia
e) Yemen
f) Central Africa
g) The Philippines
h) Guatemala

  If you guessed any of these, you were pretty close to being right.
After all, we have an ongoing war in Afghanistan that will not end after we've supposedly "withdrawn" in two years.
   There's been armed border crossing by U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan.
   Special Forces operate on the Iran border.
   We bomb Somalia on a regular basis, and the CIA operates there.
   Special Forces operate on the ground in Yemen.
   100 Green Berets were sent to Central Africa this past summer to work against a rebel army.
   Special Forces have been operating in the Philippines against rebels for some time now.
   The correct answer is "h", where Marines will be working against drug traffickers.

  Currently, U.S. Special Forces are operating in 120 nations.

   Just a few decades ago the idea of American troops being deployed in almost every nation on Earth would have freaked a few people out. Now it is simply business as usual.

   U.S. Army teams will be deploying to as many as 35 African countries early next year for training programs and other operations as part of an increased Pentagon role in Africa. The move would see small teams of U.S. troops dispatched to countries with groups allegedly linked to al-Qaeda, such as Libya, Sudan, Algeria and Niger. The teams are from a U.S. brigade that has the capability to use drones for military operations in Africa if granted permission. The deployment could also potentially lay the groundwork for future U.S. military intervention in Africa.
 Most of these nations have no al-Qaida presence.
   What happened to President George Washington's warning about foreign entanglements? 
   Some say that our real reason for extending our military presence in Africa to combat China's recent rising prominence in Africa.
   I don't know if that it true, but it certainly wouldn't be the first time our military has been used for reasons other than national security.

  after nearly nine years of war and occupation, US troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force...
      to protect the oil giants from dissent and protest, trade union offices have been raided, computers seized and equipment smashed, leaders arrested and prosecuted.
You missed the punchline 
  The War on (some) Terror has always been a bad joke.
Let's start with some basic facts:

    If we were serious about destroying al-Qaida, we would go after them where they are, right? Well, the largest known number of al-Qaida agents in the world are in Iraq. You know, the country we just pulled out of.
   There are over 1,000 agents in Iraq presently. Recall that the number of al-Qaeda agents in Iraq could be counted on one hand before we invaded.

  Our terrorism policy could be better summerized as "Good Terrrorists versus Bad Terrorists". Good Terrorists are in conflict with common enemies.
  Conservatives have long supported terrorist groups that operate against iran.
   Plus, we tend to overlook terrorist connections against common enemies in Libya and Syria.

   However, all that pales in comparison to the fact that the United States has allowed terrorists to operate from American soil for over 50 years (see Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch as prime examples).

American Imperialism and Backlash

   By now many of you have probably heard of the Korean rapper, Psy. His song "Gangam Style" is the most watched video in YouTube history.
   What many of you probably don't know is that he performed a song in 2004 called "Hey American". The lyrics go like this:

   "Kill those f---ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
      Kill those f---ing Yankees who ordered them to torture
     Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers
     Kill them all slowly and painfully"

  South Korea is not a place you normally think of for being anti-American, but it is hardly alone. America is currently more unpopular in the middle east than during the darkest days of the George W. Bush administration.

  Why are we so hated? Is it because of our freedom?
Obviously not. Half of all the refugees in the world are fleeing Americas wars. And that doesn't even count the policies of American clients, such as Israel's Palestinian problem.

   What this appears to represent is a type of brazen ignorance and egotism which has come to represent mainstream government policy; the type of myopia under which a country can launch a full-scale war, invasion and occupation of another sovereign nation under entirely false pretences, kill hundreds of thousands in the process and create millions of refugees and still at the end sincerely ask the question "Why they do hate us?".
The Cost of Empire 
  It's a statement to the power of the military-industrial complex that Social Security and Medicare are on the table for being cut, but cutting back on a worldwide military empire is spoken only in whispers.

   We have over 1,000 overseas military bases, plus another 4,000 here at home. How much does all this "forward presence" cost us?

   Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1bn a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170bn. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of "the Global War on Terror" in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.
 Why the huge difference in numbers? Well, for starters Defense Department numbers simply can't be trusted. 
    (The Department of Defence remains the only federal agency unable to pass a financial audit.)
     Although the Overseas Cost Summary initially might seem quite thorough, you'll soon notice that countries well known to host US bases have gone missing-in-action. In fact, at least 18 countries and foreign territories on the Pentagon's own list of overseas bases go unnamed.
 Nearly all this military spending overseas does nothing to help the domestic economy.
   In fact, even if it wasn't being spent overseas, military spending is probably the worst type of government spending when it comes to fiscal stimulus. 
    Military spending creates fewer jobs per million dollars expended than the same million invested in education, health care, or energy efficiency - barely half as many as investing in schools. Even worse, while military spending clearly provides direct benefits to the Lockheed Martins and KBRs of the military-industrial complex, these investments don't, as economist James Heintz says, boost the "long-run productivity of the rest of the private sector" the way infrastructure investments do. 
  To adapt a famous line from President Dwight Eisenhower: every base that is built signifies in the final sense a theft.

  So why do we keep mortgaging our future for a navy that hasn't served a real military purpose since WWII? Why do we keep mortgaging our future on missle defense systems eventhough the Cold War is over? Why are we spending insane amounts of money on bombers designed to penetrate Soviet air space when the Soviet Union no longer exists? The answer is as obvious as the current owners of all those Iraqi oil wells.

   We thus arrive at a universal, praxeological truth about war. War is the outcome of class conflict inherent in the political relationship - the relationship between ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer. The parasitic class makes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and ratchet up their exploitation of the much larger productive class. 
  Thus, a permanent state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state.

 It seems rediculous to me the subjects of gun control, freedom and protecting our children are even being debated, while we stretch our military empire over the world, flood the world in guns, and intentionally target children for death.
   We talk about security, while still supporting terrorists. We talk about fiscal responsibility, while mortgaging the future of our children to spend on useless wars that cause the rest of the world to hate us. 
  Our foreign policy is so far outside of sanity and morality one has to wonder what future generations will think about us? Will they be able to forgive us?
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