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Tulsi Poignantly Discusses America's Devastating Regime-Change Wars thefederalist.com/2019/03/18/tul…
I believe however, we are all at fault for one thing: We don’t talk enough about the cost of what Tulsi calls regime-change wars––the real, complete cost.
Sure, we contribute to wounded vets and shake our heads at the images of our dead being offloaded from the C-130s. We pretend to honor our veterans, quickly though, because the game’s about to start, but we haven’t fixed the problems at the Veterans Health Administration.
Although that news cycle has passed, our young men and women are still killing themselves daily, with a gunshot to the head or a slow descent into madness driven by booze and pills.
We raise our flags on Veteran’s Day and wear our “Never Forget” T-shirts on 9/11, even as our leaders pay trillions of our tax dollars to feed the leviathan that thrives on the drumbeats of war.
The spending is rarely debated, and the War Powers Act is collecting dust on a staffer’s shelf, yet we’ll question the patriotism of fellow countrymen or accuse them of not caring about our troops or our safety, simply for wondering if the spending is excessive.
Certainly, there are numerous writings and documentaries on the human toll of combat, but none on what war has gained for the players in our government: the lobbyists, the purveyors of combat mechanisms, the private death squads (commonly known as government contractors)....
....and the members of Congress who saturate their rhetoric with the glory of victory over our manufactured enemies, then retire wealthy, if they retire at all.
What have we gained, in concrete terms, from Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and now what next—Iran, North Korea, Venezuela?
Let’s really tally the total tax money funneled to the military industrial complex. How many trillions is it? The numbers are too big, the deals too convoluted, for us to comprehend.
What do we have to show for it other than thousands of dead in the enemy camp? What is the life of an American teenager in camo worth these days? And how, in the unfathomable mystery of the infinite universe, do the purveyors of this hell look at themselves in the mirror?
Gabbard said, “It is because those of us who have seen the cost of war firsthand, it is because of those experiences, that we fight so hard for peace.”
Yes, many brave young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines have fought valiantly and killed a lot of bad guys. They did the job we sent them to do, and they did it well. But why did we send them?
