Why has Obama extended the Iraq occupation timeline? Why is he surging troops in Afghanistan? Why won’t he shut down Cold War relic bases in Germany and elsewhere?
Possibly because of strategic considerations. Possibly because he’s a tool of the military-industrial complex. But also possibly - and nobody ever seems to mention this - because he doesn’t want to dump a quarter of a million Americans on an economy that won’t hire them.
I have to say, that same thought has occurred to me as well.
But I also thought that the $12 billion a month we are spending in Iraq could be better used here at home. Make levees, not war, yada yada. And we really need some levees, people. Do we need an Iraq War? But then idiots like Marsha Blackburn and Sarah Palin start screaming “socialism” every time a penny of government money is spent on people and communities, not corporations. So, there's that.
I’m still waiting for that “national conversation” about the Iraq War. We’ve danced around it plenty, we’ve talked about whether torture is torture when we do it, or if it’s only torture when other people do it to us. We’ve had 9/11 invoked, a lot. We’ve never talked about what the Iraq War is costing us, not just fiscally but socially and morally. We’ve never talked about our permanent war economy. Every time we start to have that conversation it gets shut down, and those who want to discuss it are written off as crackpots.
Interesting.
Guess we don’t want to look under that rock.
