President Obama is announcing 30,000 troops will be deploying to Afghanistan. Already, old friends are receiving their orders and cheerfully gearing up for more unsustainable war. I guess this is the sort of “change” we should expect. After all, this is the good war, right?
I’m wondering who is going to pay for this, as I see reported in the LA Times that a surtax has been proposed in order to get this done which should put Congress in a tight spot if this doesn’t work. Speaking of working….what are we going there to do, again? Are we preserving some more freedom? I forget.
I was doing some more reading and found that the next class of West Point cadets to graduate and head off to foreign territory to kill some folks was in grammar school on September 11th, 2001. Time flies when you’re crushing terrorism. They’ve grown up in a war culture, so this should be a no-brainer for them. Several years ago, I read an excellent book by Lt Col David Grossman called, On Killing. In his work, Lt Col Grossman takes an in depth look at the social costs of war and what it takes to train a person to engage in the unnatural act of killing other humans. Contrary to really great Hollywood movies, men will avoid killing at close range at great costs. Guess what? Turns out, it’s difficult to turn off the warrior. Turns out, engaging in war has a greater and long-term social cost than just the human death toll. Imagine that.
Nobody can seem to understand exactly why we’re in Afghanistan anymore. Ohhhhh, I remember now. I forgot about the trans-Afghanistan pipeline and the coincidental placement of troops along this pipeline. There is no doubt, Osama bin Laden is somewhere nearby, right? I forgot we’re the generation of Unintended Consequences. I forgot that We the Insolvent have more work to do. After all, there’s a GDP to inflate, and it’s our duty to inflate it. Happy motoring.
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“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.” -The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again, 1971