Will the wars ever end? I often hear it stated that once the US invades a country it never withdraws its forces. Not completely. For instance, WW2 ended in 1945, but we still have troops in Japan and Germany. 

The media propaganda about troop reduction seems to never end. A good number of voters in this country consider the war in Iraq to be over even though it's not, ended by the great peace president Barack Obama, and the war in Afghanistan to be drawing down. Warmongering Republicans don’t help by reinforcing the illusion that Obama has ended wars by attacking him for a supposed weak foreign policy.    

Our country doesn’t even do some of its fighting under its own flag. We have instead allowed for our dirty work to be carried out under the NATO banner or by mercenaries who commit so many atrocities they have to change their company name every few years to keep negative publicity from catching up with them (e.g. Blackwater/Xe/Academi).

The real question is not will it end. It has to end. We’re broke. As Ron Paul has said, “The financial calamity is going to be much worse than anybody ever invading this country.” And yet the spineless hawks continue to bang the drums of war. Sanctions are passed and the stage is continually set for more war. So will we reach a point where we demand peace or will we just crumble internally as all great empires do. Sadly, my money is on the latter.

Over at my Tumblr blog, I posted the image above during the Memorial Day weekend. Apparently, it was sufficiently provocative that an anonymous reader's father reacted negatively:

When I showed the picture of the Iraq vet and Vietnam vet to my veteran father, he was outraged over it. As a veteran yourself, how do you handle those who react like that to the anti-war movement?

How do I explain my antiwar views to my brothers in the military? I explain to my fellow veterans that as a child from a military family and as a former member of the military myself, I make the distinction between the service members who are part of the military and the civilians leaders who are in charge of them. Most of our civilian leaders have never “served” in the military and our lives and what we go through are as alien to them as the lives of foreigners we kill to us.

NB:  View this video with caution; it includes graphic and disturbing imagery.

Harper's Magazine releases video purportedly showing Blackwater thugs firing into civilians and running over Iraqi woman:

Videos posted by Harper's Magazine show the private contractor formerly known as Blackwater in Iraq running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqis' cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic.

The behavior by Blackwater seen in the videos adds even more fuel to evidence that the company "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

On this ninth Iraqiversary, it seems important to pause a moment to take a look at the past, present, and future of this most notorious quagmire.

When we invaded Iraq in 2003, I was 15 and vaguely supportive of the war out of a naive assumption that if they said we had to bomb Iraq to keep from being nuked, then bomb Iraq we must.  Nine years later it is uncomfortably obvious (and indeed has been for quite a while) that I -- and quite a few other people at the time who lacked the plea of youthful error -- was wrong:  "The most popular argument to support the Iraq war in 2003 was the one about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)….All of it turned out to be lies. Iraq didn’t possess a single WMD. Far from being a military threat to the West, the country quickly collapsed in the face of invading forces.”

As it soon became clear that WMDs were nowhere to be found, the ostensible mission switched to “spreading democracy” -- Saddam was a bad, bad man, and we must kill him.  A bad man he was, and kill him we did, but at what cost?

Madeleine Albright may have thought that killing 500,000 Iraqi children (let alone adults) through sanctions in the 1990s was “worth it” to bend the erstwhile Mesopotamia to our will, but I can’t agree.  I especially can’t agree in regards to the additional 600,000 to 1 million (or more) excess civilian deathscaused by the war following our 2003 invasion.  Proportionally, this is analogous to killing everyone in Texas or California.  If this is what it takes to spread democracy, can anyone honestly claim spreading democracy is a worthy cause?