The Lunatic's Manual
By Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed : August 3, 2010
The Army, to its credit, tells the story of a middle-aged lieutenant colonel
who had served multiple combat tours and was suffering the agonizing effects
of traumatic brain injury and dementia. He also had difficulty sleeping.
Several medications were prescribed.
On a visit to an emergency room, he was given a 30-tablet refill of Ambien.
He went to his car and killed himself by ingesting the entire prescription
with a quantity of rum. He left a suicide note that said his headaches and
other pain were unbearable.
As if there is not enough that has gone tragically wrong in this era of
endless warfare, the military is facing an epidemic of suicides. In the year
that ended Sept. 30, 2009, 160 active duty soldiers took their own lives - a
record for the Army. The Marines set their own tragic record in 2009 with 52
suicides. And this past June, another record was set - 32 military suicides
in just one month.
War is a meat grinder for service members and their families. It grinds
people up without mercy, killing them and inflicting the worst kinds of
wounds imaginable, physical and psychological. The Pentagon is trying to
cope with the surge in suicides, but it is holding a bad hand: the desperate
shortage of troops has forced military officials to lower the bar for
enlistment, thus letting in people whose drug and alcohol abuse or other
behavioral problems would previously have kept them out. And the multiple
deployments (four, five and six tours in the war zones) have jacked up
stress levels to the point where many just can't take it.
The G.I.'s have fought valiantly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands have
died and many, many more have suffered. But the wars have been conducted as
if their leaders had been reading from a lunatic's manual. This is not
Germany or Japan or the old Soviet Union that we're fighting. But after
nearly a decade, neither war has been won and there is no prospect of
winning.
Trillions of dollars are being squandered. George W. ("Mission
Accomplished") Bush took the unprecedented step of cutting taxes while
waging the wars. And Barack Obama has set a deadline for withdrawing troops
from Afghanistan without having any idea how that war might be going when
the deadline arrives.
This is warfare as it might have been waged by Laurel & Hardy. Absent the
bloodshed, it would be hilarious. I'd give a lot to hear Dwight Eisenhower
comment on the way these wars have been conducted.
July was the deadliest month yet for American troops in Afghanistan.
Sixty-six were killed, which was six more than the number who died in the
previous most deadly month, June. The nation is paying little or no
attention to those deaths, which is shameful. The president goes to
fund-raisers and yuks it up on "The View." For most ordinary Americans, the
war is nothing more than an afterthought.
We're getting the worst of all worlds in Afghanistan: We're not winning, and
we're not cutting our tragic losses. Most Americans don't care because
they're
not feeling any of the tragic losses. A tiny, tiny portion of the population
is doing the fighting, and those troops are sent into the war zone for tour
after tour, as if they're attached to a nightmarish yo-yo.
Some kind of shared sacrifice is in order, but neither Mr. Bush nor Mr.
Obama called on Americans to make any real sacrifices in connection with
either of these wars. The way to fight a war is to mobilize the country -
not just the combat troops - behind an integrated wartime effort. To do
that, leaders have to persuade the public that the war is worth fighting,
and worth paying for.
What we have in Afghanistan is a war that most Americans believe is not
worth fighting - and certainly not worth raising taxes to pay for. President
Obama has not made a compelling case for the war and has set a deadline for
the start of withdrawal that seems curiously close to the anticipated start
of his 2012 campaign for a second term.
It's time to bring the curtain down for good on these tragic, farcical wars.
The fantasy of democracy blossoming at the point of a gun in Iraq and
spreading blithely throughout the Middle East has been obliterated. And it's
hard to believe that anyone buys the notion that the U.S. can install a
successful society in the medieval madness of Afghanistan.
For those who haven't noticed, we have a nation that needs rebuilding here
at home. Maybe we could muster some shared sacrifice on that front.
wounded, and thank them all for their extraordinary service. It's time to
come to our senses and put the lunatic's manual aside.
***
From: Romi Elnagar
"Let Them Eat Cake"
A handful of oligarchs are becoming billionaires while the rest of
the country goes down the drain.
By Paul Roberts
Global Research
Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20389
It
is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to
drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this
large sum wouldn't cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When
country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006,
their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a
celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump
married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The
marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and
Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up
the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now
comes the politicians's daughter as celebrity. According to news
reports, Chelsea Clinton's wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky
on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London
Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional
$2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret
Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads
of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along
with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and
Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned
felon.
Before
we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair
during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy
who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got
such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his
service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight
years in office?
How
did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of
ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he
left office?
Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While
Chelsea's wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000
floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise
contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people,
whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job
offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa
Roberts' food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house
roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household
according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The
Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts' food pantry has "had to
cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for
everyone who needed it."
Theresa
DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write
messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has
just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in
Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of
the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The
Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one
million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime
squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The
Guardian's reporting relies on a US government report from the US
Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the
US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy
sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US
Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected
the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is
released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on
food stamps.
The
Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in
pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and
almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay
alive.
The
world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the
final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are
becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the
drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
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