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"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I like to think that not every war which Americans fought was a scam, though for sure far too many were, and that makes the personal tragedies involved so much more tragic. But other than the fact that (so far) a lot less people have died in Iraq than did in Vietnam, it is unimaginable how this war could be any more tragically wasteful of American (and, far more, Iraqi) lives than it is. And it is unimaginable how an administration could be more contemptuous of those individuals, many of whom choose to serve out of a sheer dedication and patriotism that is completely foreign to cowardly avoiders like Bush and Cheney.
Pat Tillman is the paradigmatic case. By all accounts he was motivated by pure patriotism to sacrifice a career of fame and wealth in order to defend his country after 9/11, and by going to war he knowingly risked sacrificing infinitely more. It was bad enough that he did so only to be killed by friendly fire, though that happens in all wars, and is no doubt usually the result of the best of intentions, if not always the greatest competence.
What cannot be condoned, however, was that he died in Afghanistan fighting a war which his commander-in-chief seems, at best, to have been only vaguely interested in prosecuting, and a lot less than even that once it became possible to instead pursue his pet project in the desert sands of Mesopotamia.
What cannot be condoned is that his president and those around him called upon people like Pat Tillman to fight wars that they wouldn't fight when it was their turn.
What cannot be condoned is that people like Pat Tillman were turned into props for Karl Rove's marketing machine, the most cynically bloody political project this side of the 1930s. What cannot be condoned is that his family was lied to about his fate, even while Rove was turning him into a commercial to help move more product.
And what cannot be condoned is that those who were "luckier" than Pat Tillman were cast aside when no longer useful to this gaggle of dark hearts, left to rot with enforced silence in cockroach-infested holding pens, there to begin the looming decades of unalterable suffering, deprivation and frustration which will forever haunt their broken lives.
The sad truth is that this president, this vice-president, and this administration have never given a damn for the soldiers they've condemned to lives filled with agony, when they aren't lives simply cut short in the flower of their youth. (And let's not even get started on their lack of concern for the infinitely greater number of Iraqi lives shattered by their sporting adventure.) These soldiers are tools to be used for a purpose. They might as well be wrenches or rifles. Their purpose is to win glory and the spoils of war for Bush and Cheney and ExxonMobil.
They have another purpose, as well. These soldiers - these presidential tools - serve as props for Bush administration photo-op propaganda efforts. But only if they're new and shiny and whole, of course. Rove and his minions regularly make sure that the wounded ones - the amputees, the burned, scarred and mangled, the ones with caved-in crania and permanently melted faces - that these are kept to the side, out of the photo with the smiling, caring, commander-in-chief. And you can bet there won't be any cockroach-infested rooms or three-day old soiled hospital sheets in the pictures either.
You have to wonder what happened in somebody's childhood to make them so heartless that they could launch a war like this, based on utter and complete lies, leave the wrecked bodies who come back from it in dumping stations like Walter Reed, stall on providing them even the minimal benefits to which they're entitled, and then have the audacity to pull the wounded out of presidential photo sessions.
I'm sorry George, Dick, Karl, if your mother was cold or your father distant. I truly am. But this has to stop. As you are so fond of reminding us, it's all about personal responsibility. Isn't it still? Regardless of personal circumstances, right? Doesn't that apply equally to sanctimonious keepers of the public morality as well as to the poor SOBs whom you love to strap onto death chamber gurneys? (And they are, in fact, always poor, and always the product of far more damaging childhoods than you could imagine.) Doesn't it apply to you Deciders whose decisions have terminated nearly a million lives in Iraq, and brought untold misery to millions more?
So when will you guys take responsibility for what you've done? When will you attend a military funeral? When will you simply knock some freakin' heads together inside the administration which you fully control to fix the medical sys
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