Another young person from my part of the world was killed in Afghanistan this past week – a Marine who grew up a 
stone’s throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He’s the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it’s disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn’t give up a meal at Wendy’s to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we’re a nation at war, but it’s not so – we’re a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of underwriting the global projection of military power. Not worth that young person’s life… nor anyone else’s.
Not, may I add, worth the lives of those who inhabit the lands we invade, either. From the perspective of a well-insulated stateside public, they die nameless, sometimes killed by remote control from a command center in the heart of America where faceless technicians murder strangers with the wag of a joystick then drive home for dinner with the family. If there ever was a truer illustration of the moral bankruptcy of empire, I’ve yet to hear about it. War should never be risk free and tidy, particularly for the aggressor. It becomes too attractive an option, as we have seen in recent years particularly. I suppose by allowing us to see the returning coffins of military dead, subject to the consent of the family, the Obama Administration is at least providing some rudimentary means by which Americans may become better acquainted with the notion that we have wars going on, and that those wars are a major problem worthy of their attention.
As I write these lines – not long after beginning this column – news has come through of five more U.S. soldiers killed in Mosul, Iraq. This comes on the heels of a multi-billion dollar supplemental appropriations request from the Administration to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This feels like a perpetual motion policy machine to me. Bush is gone and Obama has climbed into the cockpit, promising to be a better, more thoughtful driver than his predecessor… but it is still this massive killing machine designed to do only one thing. The only thing powerful enough to stop it is, well, us. Only we have to be aware of the fact that it needs stopping. And right now we’re busy with other stuff. As Obama said, you gotta be able to do more than one thing at a time. Let’s take his advice.
Well… what are we waiting for?
luv u,
jp
