Whose War?

 This morning's message in my mail box from William Rivers Pitt at     messenger@truthout.org

            
I had the unfortunate privilege last week of authoring a Truthout piece titled "The Pleasant Fiction of 'No Boots on the Ground.'" I argued that the presence of ISIS troops in major metropolitan areas of northern Iraq makes President Obama's air strikes campaign largely an exercise in highly expensive pyrotechnics, because you can't bomb city-entrenched troops out of existence without bombing the city itself out of existence. When I woke up on Tuesday morning, the New York Times greeted me with a headline reading, "In Iraq, Strikes Fail to Dislodge ISIS." Because golly gosh oh gee, who could have possibly anticipated that?


We started bombing Syria on that same Tuesday morning, using the $700 billion F-22 Raptor stealth fighter for the first time. Your tax dollars at work! Never mind the bridge you drive over that trembles at the weight of your car for lack of repair, or the public school you send your kids to that can't afford textbooks for every student, or the homeless veteran in a cardboard box on the sidewalk. Let's cough up $700 billion instead for a plane we then use to bomb the problems we caused by bombing the problems we caused. That always works, right? Oh, and let’s not even bother counting the civilian casualties we rack up.

Let's just add: how/why did this so-called 'war' start anyway? Has anyone ever heard of 'blowback'? Who are the beneficiaries of these invasions? What % of the population supports these acts of violence and to what extent do they have knowledge of the real facts behind them?
JS