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Just because you are not of the sixties generation does not mean that you have nothing to understand or to learn.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemed to repeat it. -- George Santyana
Out of that time (from the Nixon and Ford Administrations) came two evil men, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They believed at the time that we became justifiably involved in the Vietnam War just at they believed now about the Iraq War. They believed in an Imperial Presidency (unitary executive), that fighting "for democracy/freedom" by sacrificing American lives and civilian lives in other nations they deemed less free was an acceptable cost of achieving their ideology, whether it be anti-communism or anti-Islamic. Enormous profits have been made off of these wars by "the military-industrial complex" (then) and corporatism (now) for their friends -- the people they serve -- rich oligarchical masters for whom the rest of the nation is sacrificed over and over and over. Like Nixon then, Cheney now continues to encourage the erosion of our constitutional rights. Presidents are above the law. As Nixon said then, "When the President does it, it's not against the law" (paraphrase).
In Vietnam, over 50,000 American military personnel died. I suspect that history will tell us that the burst of economic bubble was fueled in part by inflation designed to fund the Iraq War. Will people die from the resulting poverty?
Yes, they will.
We have to end these wars. We cannot afford them and we cannot afford the enormous risk which they bring to the world at large.
And no, just because we have have the power to steal other people's oil, doesn't mean it's ours.
It worries me that Obama wants to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, but I am at least encouraged that he seems to recognize the problem that oil dependence causes. Step by step, we need to become energy independence.
The war in Iraq is as immoral now as the Vietnam War was then.
