By Dave Lindorff
Let’s be honest about America’s wars and the men and women who have fought them.
Most of the wars that the US has launched or fought in, dating back to at least the War of 1812, were not just or necessary, could have been avoided, and wasted precious lives and national wealth, often while slaughtering the people of weaker nations.
In the latest scandal precipitated by Commander in Chief Donald Trump — a man who notoriously got a doctor to lie for him about his having debilitating “bone spurs” so he wouldn’t have to serve in the military during the Vietnam War — we have a president who is the leader of the military who, it is reliably confirmed, has disparaged the people who fought in those wars. He has called them “losers” for being killed or captured in battle. He has declined to memorialize them. He has had wounded veterans kept out of military parades because he felt vets in wheelchairs and on walkers or crutches or missing limbs “are not a good look.” He has called soldiers who served in Vietnam “losers and suckers” for going and fighting and dying there, since, as he knew from his own experience, the draft was “easy to get out of.” And he has declined to visit the graves in France of US dead from WWI, calling them “losers” for getting killed.
It’s all pretty outrageous, particularly for a man who for four years as president has been sending American troops into or keeping them in battle zones in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the globe, creating more dead “losers” in the process.
But let’s also at least acknowledge that, whether by accident or not, the president did say two correct things, for which he should not be criticized. One was that Vietnam was a “stupid” war. The other was that, in the case of World War I, it was hard to know “Who were the good guys in this war?” Braindead US pundits have attacked the president for saying these things about these two wars as though that is a sacrilege and somehow an insult to American veterans, but they’re wrong. Those wars were both stupid and unnecessary.
There are two issues to be raised here. One is the national policies and leadership that have historically sent Americans abroad into battle to kill, fight, be maimed for life and even to die. The other is the behavior in battle of those soldiers who have been dispatched to fight America’s wars.
And let me be clear: Trump’s dismissal of WWI and Vietnam as “stupid” wars is not indication that he is anti-war. His abrogation of the multi-national agreement with Iran on limiting its nuclear power program, his pull-out from the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, his continuation of Obama’s trillion-dollar nuclear-weapons “modernization” program, his US Space Force and record expansion of the military budget show he’s as much a warmonger as most of his predecessors.…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/trump-disses-troops-but-correctly-labels-2-of-americas-costliest-wars-unjustified-or-stupid/