The Wicked

     Approximately half of Afghanistan and Iraq U.S. war veterans in need of mental health care aren't getting it due to Veterans Administration backlog and neglect by a government giving easy praise to military servicemen and -women while doing nothing to help them.
     An average of twenty veterans kill themselves every day.  An average of 7,300 veterans kill themselves each year.  That tops by quite a margin the number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks and overwhelms the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in combat situations.
     Is this an indication that the United States and its allies are winning the Global War on Terror?  Is it rather glaring evidence that the United States leadership is killing its own military personnel?
     I read an article two days ago in Consortium News about the Vietnam War-obsessed generals running the U.S. military now and advising Donald Trump.  Most of them became officers after the end of the Vietnam War.  Most of them believe it was possible to win in Southeast Asia.  Some of them, like the sainted David Petraeus and Trump's national security adviser H.R. McMaster, have written books about what could have been done differently to win in Vietnam.  It's like a man reevaluating his fucked up former marriage.
     These generals are thrilled with a Trump whose willing to follow their advice.  Dominating, killing, destroying buildings, strengthening an already cartoonish titanic military machine while claiming its in bad shape and needs more funding, the bigger the better way of thinking practiced by the current President, makes for high-ranking military men believing they can improve America's standing by "applying the lessons learned in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency theaters."
     Remember when President Bush in 1989 launched Operation Just Cause?  23,000 American military personnel attacked Panama to arrest its leader, Manuel Noriega (a cocaine trafficker and important link in helping the Contras through purchase of military hardware with drug money, with Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's consent).  It seems likely that Bush had an ulterior motive for attacking Panama.  Noriega had to be silenced, he knew too much about the Latin American dirty wars funded and enabled by the CIA.  Noriega himself had been a CIA asset--he knew George Bush, Director of the CIA in the mid-1970s.  After killing about 4,000 Panamanian civilians and putting those made homeless in "temporary" but not so temporary camps in which large numbers of them were concentrated, making them concentration camps, Bush crowed, "Now we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!"
     The humiliation of losing the unwinnable wars in Southeast Asia in which millions died, overwhelming greatly the number of Americans killed there, finally was, according to Bush, "kicked."
     America felt hard and strong again.  The Gulf War (also waged by Bush) further proved American strength and introduced embedding journalists with troops, a way to prevent them from writing critically about the military, since the journalists' lives depended on the soldiers and Marines around them.
     In that war we got introduced to "smart" bombs and missiles, to supposedly clean kills involving multiple tons of explosives shot from A-10 Warthog killing machines.  "Precision" bombs that "minimize collateral damage."  These counterfactual ideas circulated into the American mindset, into journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans not reminding themselves that bombs EXPLODE.  People in the way of the explosions die and are wounded.  Bombs and missiles destroy infrastructure required for a modern society to work properly, leading to disease, shortness of lifespans, no electricity, a broken land "saved" by construction contractors from the nation that did the destruction, hence, one major reason for bombing.  The subsequent War on Terror has made the "collateral damage" apologists seem extremely stupid when they even bother to think about what bombs and missiles are.  They say the same kind of thing when apologizing for criminal acts committed by a president, any president involved in prosecuting aggressive war (which the U.S. has been doing as readily as Nazi Germany and Napoleon did).
     "Being President is a really hard job, they have to make tough choices."
     Just think how stressful Hitler's job was.  Stalin's.  Mao's.  Mussolini's.  All of them eliminated people for specific reasons, and Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Reagan, also practice that.  If killing children and women bothers them they don't reveal that emotion to us, even after they've retired.  U.S. actions in the Middle East, the Iraq War for example, qualify as internationally recognized criminality.  Making war on a nation (Iraq) that isn't a threat to the aggressor is against international law, it's in treaties signed by the United States.  Everybody running every country in the world knows this.  Everybody knows that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals with far greater body counts than some, like Slobodan Milosevic, who hanged himself in his cell before he met justice in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
     I want a President who doesn't believe that killing children is the best course of action.  Someone who comes up with alternative solutions involving deescalation, true goodwill, compassionate assistance, atoning for the crimes committed by the United States since the end of World War Two.  I know we don't have leaders or potential leaders with the wisdom to practice such a way.  Instead, Trump says "Peace through strength," and news commentators don't even bother to point out the Orwellian nature of that slogan.  Peace through strength means our version of peace in which other nations knuckle under to our might as we exploit controlled nations full of people fucked with by neo-Liberal policies as their countries' natural resources get exploited by foreign corporations.
     Side note: Yesterday an Amtrak train carrying Republican lawmakers on their way to a "retreat" in West Virginia, to have policy meetings about how to further fuck the American people, collided with a garbage truck crossing the tracks at the exact wrong time.  One in the truck was killed, two in the truck injured, injuries sustained on the train were minor, but one Congressman got wheeled away, conscious, on a stretcher.  The ideal headline on this wasn't used on cable news, but I'll provide one:

                                                                         GOP: Train Wreck

                                                                                                                    Vic Neptune