Shadow Wars

The American people hate war. We hate sending the youth of our nation to suffer heinous physical and psychological wounds if they're lucky and lose their lives if they're not. But the Cold War addicts in the American government love it, so like a junkie shooting up between his toes to hide the track marks, they've gone underground. While the population is distracted by establishment smokescreens like media-manufactured show trials and mollified by feel-good reunion shows that exploit the soldiers and their families to garner public support, the warmongers endlessly and needlessly send more troops into combat without a clear definition of "victory" against an enemy with a thousand-year history of violent resistance against repeated foreign occupation.

Meanwhile at home, to question the decisions or methods of the War Department (don't believe their "defense" doublespeak, where was our defense on 911? Oh yeah, they were in on it) is tantamount to conspiring with the enemy. If you dare to protest unjust and illegal wars waged "to keep us free," you are charged with "reducing morale" and placing our sacred freedom warriors in further danger. The only freedom our wars protect today is that of America's military-based economy.

War is America's chief export and weapons are its primary domestic product. War is such a vital part of the American economy that peace would simply cost too many jobs. War is our greatest job creator. Just as World War II got us out of the Great Depression and made America the Greatest Nation on Earth™, the escalation of the Global War on Terror by (2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner) Obama will put us all back to work exporting death. Like the tendrils of a noxious creeping weed, weapons contractors and war profiteers have virulently infested every Congressional district in the country, ensuring their local importance to pork-hungry lawmakers. The military-industrial complex has so intertwined itself in the economy that the largest employer in Alabama is Lockheed-Martin.

 The War Department demands more and more taxpayer money every year to keep their vision of endless war alive. Just like its open-ended operations in the Middle East, the Pentagon throws billions of dollars at open-ended weapons development, like a warplane expected to fill every combat role imaginable, a shallow-water warship filled with robots, a hypersonic glider designed to drop bombs anywhere on Earth in under an hour (or your pizza's free!), and a missile-zapping lightning gun whose scrap parts were sold on eBay. These expensive weapon boondoggles have gone on for years, will never be finished, and do nothing to help our soldiers; they only serve to keep the war profiteers balance sheets in the black.

With the military tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Shadow Wars are fought in secret by the CIA and private contractors. Leon Panetta went from CIA chief spook to Secretary of War, and General David Patraeus took his place as CIA director; a crossover between espionage and military expertise. The two agencies have become the same entity, launching secret drone strikes across international borders that kill dozens of civilians to take out a possible terrorist outhouse, then disavowing any knowledge of the "unattributed explosions" through mass media lapdogs who dutifully report as truth whatever propaganda their "anonymous government sources" wish to disseminate.

The unmanned drone is America's weapon of choice in the Shadow Wars. Instead of an infantryman toughing it out on the battlefield with an M-16, you have a joystick jockey in Nevada who kisses his wife and kids after a breakfast of Pop Tarts and soy milk before commuting off to war. The war of the future involves no risk to Americans, who will safely sit at their consoles and distribute death to all kinds of brown people through their hovering terminators with the push of a button. Tomorrow's soldiers are already being indoctrinated to do just that by playing combat-glorifying video games.

The CIA also operates an unknown number of black site "interrogation facilities" (torture prisons). Despite his campaign promise to shutter Gitmo, our Nobel-Laureate-in-Chief is instead opening more torture prisons worldwide, in such hot vacation destinations as Bagram, Afghanistan and Mogadishu, Somalia. First-class amenities include indefinite imprisonment without trial, waterboarding and plausible deniability. Add these to your travel guide of permanent US military installations along with Iraq, Germany, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Guam, Bermuda, and the British Indian Ocean Territory, just to name a few.

When our forces are successful and what civilians that survive the bloody asymmetric conflict are "liberated," what's the next step? Why, send in the beneficent American corporate interests to divide the resources and profit from the "nation building," of course!

The American Military Establishment goes to war paying lip service to noble concepts like spreading democracy and defending our freedom, when its real goals are lining the pockets of its corporate patrons and expanding the power of the president. These Shadow Wars are wars of conquest, and proof that imperialism is alive and well.