Smedley Butler was Right: 'War is a Racket'

What would Smedley say if he knew about Afghanistan?

(CINCINNATI, Ohio) - Nothing is worse for America than war. Nothing does more to hurt democracy here and around the world and nothing is more dishonorable than justifying war based on lies and excuses that nobody takes seriously.

I would like to blame Reagan for the phony Panama and Grenada wars. I loved Panama; a drug dealing ally cheats his American drug dealing partners and we invade a country? No other spin has stuck on that one.

Historians can take it back, not decades but centuries. We started stealing in the 1600s, long before we were a country. Indians fed us, taught us and we sent troops into their villages and murdered them. The real reason for pushing the Constitution thru to replace the Articles of Confederation was to make sure "regular folks" would stay broke and hungry and end up fighting war after war started by speculators and profiteers. This isn't socialism, its history.

Long before we went to war for oil, we invaded countries for sugar and bananas. General Smedley Butler, one of the Marine Corp's greatest heroes left us the writing on the wall, for those who care to learn and act. Profiteers and Pentagon hacks sell war to the ignorant as patriotism like selling maggot ridden meat to the starving.

We have now hit the bottom of the barrel. I thought the Vietnam War was a fiasco, a war I got a close up view of. Afghanistan is unbelievable. We are actually fighting one of the poorest and most primitive nations on Earth for no imaginable reason and losing.

Hubris

I can't call it anything else. Nobody can explain it. Nobody can justify it. Nobody even wants it but we keep on and on as though some invisible force drove us insane. Our actions are nothing but insane. We all agree on this and are powerless to stop ourselves. If our nation was a person, we would have to be committed to an asylum for the criminally insane.

Maybe Afghanistan is a way of proving that everything we are no longer competent to look after our own affairs. We are obviously doing ourselves harm, to the point of suicide, out of a compulsion tied to something unseen? Is it genetic? Were we abused as children?

Our political tendencies certainly prove us failures as parents. Few societies abuse and kill their own children both privately and publicly as do Americans. It isn't an accident that thousands of our children choose war and death because they no longer have any hope of economic survival in the society we have built for them.

It certainly proves our military industrial complex hates America and that our military leaders are a pack of gutless worms. I suspect that is not much of a secret anymore. Senseless human suffering wrapped in the flag and obscured by greed and corruption has created a monster feeding off our children we have chosen to admire instead of impale.

Can anyone imagine a possible positive outcome from fighting a war in Afghanistan? For 2000 years idiots have gone there, the absolute toilet of the Earth, seemingly with as a way of expressing to others that they have too much time on their hands, nothing worthwhile to do or simply find seeing people killed uselessly as entertainment.

War for profit is one thing. I could understand invading Iraq to steal oil. I could even understand our wars in Central America. Our fruit and sugar companies would have been financially devastated if Marines hadn't hunted down revolutionaries who would have pushed thru higher wages for workers, restored free elections or allowed a free press.

Afghanistan is the gods testing us. Consider it. A war where there is nothing whatsoever to win and nothing to lose unless we choose to stay. Could anything be clearer than this?

As a nation, we are showing the judgement of someone who would put their hand in a garbage disposal and turn it on. Even an insane person would remove the stump eventually, but not us.

Find General Butler interesting? You might want to check this article also: One of History's Toughest Marines, Smedley Butler, was Anti-War (VIDEO) - Tim King Salem-News.com

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Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and a regular contributor to Veterans Today. He specializes in political and social issues. You can see a large collection of Gordon's published articles at this link: VeteransToday.com.

He is an outspoken advocate for veterans and his powerful words have brought about change. Gordon is a lifelong PTSD sufferer from his war experiences and he is empathetic to the plight of today's veterans also suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to feature Gordon's timely and critical reports on Salem-News.com, a news organization staffed by a number of veterans, particularly former U.S. Marines.

You can send Gordon Duff an email at this address: Gpduf@aol.com