Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist

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TomDispatch ?@TomDispatch
Seven Deadly Reasons Why America’s Wars Persist http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175950/ by retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore


1. The privatization of war: The U.S. military’s recourse to private contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and prolonged wars as well...

2. The embrace of the national security state by both major parties: ___Since his election in 2008, Barack Obama has done little to alter the course set by his predecessors. He, too, has chosen not to challenge Washington’s prevailing catechism of war...

3. “Support Our Troops” as a substitute for thought. ___Instead of admitting their mistakes, America’s leaders have worked to obscure them by endlessly overpraising our “warriors” as so many universal heroes...

4. Fighting a redacted war. War, like the recent Senate torture report, is redacted in America. Its horrors and mistakes are suppressed, its patriotic whistleblowers punished, even as the American people are kept in a demobilized state. The act of going to war no longer represents the will of the people, as represented by formal Congressional declarations of war as the U.S. Constitution demands. Instead, in these years, Americans were told to go to Disney World (as George W. Bush suggested in the wake of 9/11) and keep shopping. They’re encouraged not to pay too much attention to war’s casualties and costs, especially when those costs involve foreigners with funny-sounding names (after all, they are, as American sniper Chris Kyle so indelicately put it in his book, just “savages”).

Redacted war hides the true cost of a permanent state of killing from the American people, if not from foreign observers. Ignorance and apathy reign, even as a national security state that is essentially a shadow government equates its growth with your safety...

5. Threat inflation: ___Back in September, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham warned that ISIS and its radical Islamic army was coming to America to kill us all. ISIS, of course, is a regional power with no ability to mount significant operations against the United States. But fear is so commonplace, so effectively stoked in this country that Americans routinely and wildly exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or ISIS or the bogeyman du jour...


read more: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175950/

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[scarletwoman]

3. Very good! K&R!

[RiverLover]

4. "wildly exaggerate the threat posed by al-Qaeda or ISIS or the bogeyman du jour"

And ironically, the US was working WITH al-Queda in Syria against ISIS. But they're still our enemy right across the border in Iraq.

And we are in a "permanent state of killing" over there. Making more people hate US. Creating more "terrorists" who hate the terrorism by the US.

If we left them alone, I wonder what would happen?

Do we kill all those middle easterners over control of oil? And if so, why does OPEC control oil prices against our wishes?