Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Obama put the anti-war movement to sleep

A pair of stark reminders that US occupations still rage on.

From Iraq:


From Afghanistan:
"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." - General Stanley McChrystal, March 2010

The video above is not aberrant behavior, it's closer to standard operating procedure. Assuming EVERYONE is an insurgent trying to kill you is not as unreasonable as it sounds. As a result, these occupations kill LOTS of civilians. Killing civilians creates terrorists. (videos like the above really drive home why) The idea that our presence in these countries is to "protect us from terrorists" is laughable. Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq will only create more terrorists and continue to justify our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's time for the anti-war movement to wake up from the slumber Obama's election put it in. Aside from escalating the Afghanistan conflict, not a single thing has changed and yet the once massive anti-war movement has disappeared. I am sure there is some bizarre case to be made for perpetual war in the middle east... right now no one's even being asked to make it.



('DiggThis’)

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