Some of us are old enough to remember a time when the US still had some vestige of a free Republic, before the elites declared that our late, great Constitution was a “living, breathing document,” and then proceeded to murder it. The Constitution, of course, was intended to limit the power of government in order to safeguard our inalienable, God-given rights. It required that Congress formerly declare war before we send our troops to invade nations most Americans cannot find on a map, in order to prevent rash decisions leading to unnecessary conflicts.
Of course, it was always understood that there are times when American lives are at risk and the President must take immediate action on his own, but at least there was some limit on the chief executive’s power. Despite this, we suffered the consequences of some wars that we could have avoided. The South had a constitutional right to secede and Lincoln should never have used force. The Spanish-American war was a war of conquest, pure and simple. WWI was supposedly intended to “make the world safe for democracy,” but, instead, made it safe for fascism in Russia and then in Japan, Italy, and Germany.
WWII led to the defeat of the Italian, German, and Japanese fascists but led to the expansion of the communist variety into Eastern Europe and then into China and beyond. But then our glorious leaders stopped even pretending to follow the Constitution and involved us in costly, undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam, neither of which achieved a victory.
You might think that we would have learned the bitter lesson of those two conflicts, but no, the neocons (warlike leftists entrenched in both parties) have managed to trap us into unending war, usually at the behest of the UN, for purposes of regime change or “peace keeping.” In fact, if we were not involved in foreign wars, we would need only relatively small ground forces for homeland defense and could save a great deal of money as well as American lives. Consider the following conflicts, none of them preceded by a real declaration of war.
Ronald Reagan is practically worshipped by many patriots, but he made Bonesman George Bush his Vice President, and stocked his administration with Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) members, after promising not to. And he sent our Navy into the Persian Gulf and then involved us in the Lebanese civil war, with no clear strategy or objectives.
On 4/18/83 Islamic terrorists bombed our embassy in Beirut, which had inadequate protection. Learning nothing from this, Reagan’s administration continued to require that our soldiers’ weapons be carried with no round chambered, and placed no barriers around our Marine barracks, leaving the building vulnerable to truck bombs. Predictably, on 10/23/83, terrorists drove an explosive-laden truck into the barracks and killed 241 of our troops.
For this kind of negligence (or worse) the commander of the barracks, the Commandant of the USMC, the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense, and even Reagan himself should have been held accountable, and, at the very least, forced to resign. But in America the elites are never, ever held accountable for anything.
In the Caribbean nation of Grenada a communist leader was murdered and replaced by another communist (leftists love to turn on one another), who, with Cuban aid, began building an airfield. Claiming that this would be used for aggressive military action and that US medical students in Grenada might be at risk, Reagan launched “Operation Urgent Fury,” an invasion of the island, in which the US was aided a bit by other Caribbean nations.
Our military had no useful maps of the island; our services could not properly communicate with one another; Navy SEALs and a USAF Combat Controller were parachuted at night into rough seas, drowning four SEALs; and the US lost a total of 19 killed and 116 wounded. Other than that, it went about as well as could be hoped, and today Grenada is non-communist and the natives actually seem grateful to us. But was it worth the cost?
In 12/89 George I (George Bush senior) launched “Operation Just Cause,“ invading Panama to overthrow the brutal and corrupt regime of Manuel Noriega. He was allowing drug money to be laundered in Panama, but he had also collaborated with our CIA and Drug Enforcement Agency in our eternal “war on drugs.” With our would-be masters, everything is a war. Noriega, not the brightest bulb in the room, gave the US the perfect excuse by ordering, or at least allowing, his Panamanian Defense Force goons to murder an unarmed USMC lieutenant and injure two other US officers.
As in Grenada, the US depended mainly on our elite and special operations troops like the SEALs, airborne rangers, and Eighty Second Airborne Division. There were the usual tactical errors, such as SEALs trying to storm an airfield and walking into an ambush, and 23 US troops were killed and 325 wounded; we killed 205 Panamanian military people and 2,500-3,500 civilians. That hardly counts as a “surgical strike.” Again, there was at least some justification for the war, as a less brutal regime was put in place, and we retained control over the vital Panama Canal…until Jimmy Peanuts (Carter) gave it away. But every undeclared war sets a dangerous precedent for more of the same.
And George I gave us more of the same. In 1990 Iraq’s brutal dictator Saddam Hussein (oddly, we later wound up with a President named Hussein) invaded his neighboring Gulf State, Kuwait. He felt he had at least some justification for this, as Kuwait refused to forgive his debt to them for their loans that had helped finance his previous war with Iran. The US had supported Iraq in that war, and the Sunni Muslim Kuwaitis felt menaced by Shiite Muslim Iran. Also, Hussein accused Kuwait of slant drilling into Iraqi oilfields.
The US accused Iraq of monstrous atrocities in Kuwait, most of which were later proven never to have happened. The US government also claimed that Iraq would next invade Saudi Arabia and thereby disrupt oil production. There is no evidence that Saddam had any such plan. We built up our forces in Saudi Arabia (Operation Desert Shield) and then launched an air war and finally a ground war (Operation Desert Storm), invading and liberating Kuwait and practically destroying Iraq’s military.
The whole operation was brilliantly planned and executed, and “only” 146 Americans died (that our government admits). Many more were wounded, some maimed for life. Bear in mind that Saddam Hussein had never supported terrorist groups. And he was left in power.
Not content with all this waste and carnage, on 12/4/92 George I joined a UN “Unified Task Force” to protect “humanitarian efforts” in the failed (and Islamic) state of Somalia, a Third World hellhole that all the wealth on Earth could never save. On 12/9/92 US Marines landed there, beginning the misnamed “Operation Restore Hope.”
Slick Willy Clinton, he of the long body count, continued this insane fiasco, wasting the lives of 53 US troops killed and 153 wounded. We lost 18 dead and 73 wounded just in one day in the ill-conceived “Blackhawk down” incident. Then the US imported thousands of illiterate Somali thugs, all of them fanatical Muslims, into the US.
Meanwhile, the former nation of Yugoslavia, comprised of Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, and Muslim peoples of varying ethnic groups, fell apart and a complex civil war began among the various factions. There were Serbians living among Croatians, and Bosnians living among Serbians…that sort of thing. Thanks to the left’s “divide and conquer” strategy, the USA is beginning to look like that.
Slick Willy and the slimestream media claimed that the wicked (and mostly Christian) Serbs were committing genocide against the simply adorable Bosnian Muslims. The number killed was greatly exaggerated by the media, and they ignored the fact that the Bosnians and Croatians murdered at least as many people as the Serbs, if not more. The media compared the Serbs to Nazis, but, in WWII, the Serbs had been our allies against Hitler, and the Croatians and Bosnians were his allies.
And the Bosnians were closely tied to the Iranian mullahs, and were major heroin traffickers. By 1992 the former nation was in a full-scale civil war, and the heroic Slick sent in US forces as the main part of the UN’s “Operation Deliberate Force.” Again, Americans died; we bombed civilians; and we spent billions of dollars…and for what?
Before leaving office, Slick also bombarded Sudan with cruise missiles on 8/20/98 in retaliation for Islamic terrorist bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It’s not clear what the government of Sudan had to do with the bombings, and Slick succeeded in destroying a pharmaceutical factory.
When the Afghans refused to extradite Osama bin Laden, blamed by the US for our 9/11 false flag attack, George II launched “Operation Enduring Freedom,” which had nothing to do with freedom but has certainly endured…we are still bogged down there today. It went well in the beginning when our military used Special Forces, USAF Combat Controllers, and airpower very effectively, but then, perhaps inevitably, a guerilla war began.
Our much-vaunted military, with massive airpower, has been unable to defeat a rag-tag band of insurgents, and we are supporting a regime led by homosexual child rapists and heroin dealers. By 9/25/17 3,541 allied troops had died, including 2,403 Americans (these are official figures…take them with a grain of salt). By 8/22/17 the war had (again, officially) cost the US $1.07 trillion dollars, while our national debt climbed to $20 trillion.
Not content with this fiasco, George II launched the Second Gulf War by invading Iraq on 3/20/2008. The Iraqis had chemical weapons, but “our” government’s claim that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons continues to suffer from a severe shortage of evidence. Ditto for the claims that Saddam supported al Qaeda. Of course, guerilla warfare developed here too, and fighting dragged on and on, with the US suffering particularly heavy losses in the two battles in Fallujah. So far we have lost at least 4,424 killed and 31,952 wounded.
The cost so far is $3 to $6 trillion…who’s counting? Between $6 and $12 billion in cash has simple disappeared. In English, that means stolen. And now ISIS has a foothold in Iraq, and the national government we put in place is Shiite-dominated and friendly to Iran. Was George II a strategic genius, or what?
Since then, Hussein Obama sent US planes to intervene in Libya, with some help from NATO allies, leading to the overthrow and murder of Libyan dictator Ghaddafi, who had once supported terrorism but had since become effectively an ally of the West. In the vacuum left by his fall, terrorist groups took over parts of the country, and it was these groups who became ISIS.
There is good reason to suspect that the US has helped to create, finance, and arm ISIS, and that Hussein Obama may have deliberately set up Ambassador Stevens to be killed because he knew too much for his own good. If so, the Witch (Hillary) was heavily involved. All of this appears to be connected with our glorious leaders’ attempt to overthrow the Syrian government led by Bashar al Assad, a relatively sane and moderate regime (by Middle Eastern standards) and replace it with hard core Islamists. Positively brilliant.
Supposedly we are no longer supporting ISIS or attempting to overthrow the Assad, but the Russians (who support his government) seem to think otherwise. May I remind everyone that Russia has enough nuclear warheads to incinerate us? Many of us voted for Donald Trump because he questioned the wisdom of our overseas wars, and we hoped he would end them.
Instead, he has supported the Saudis in their war in Yemen, and is sending more troops into Afghanistan. And, claiming that the wicked Syrians had used chemical weapons against their own people, Trump hit them with 59 cruise missiles. We have heard these claims of chemical weapons before, and, again, proof is lacking. And this also increases tensions with Russia and the danger of out-of-control escalation leading to nuclear war, which no one wants. Or do they?
The views expressed by story contributors to All News Pipeline are their own and do not always align completely with those of ANP.
