Tag: Military

This isn’t rocket science, if the country had paid attention as we were returning from Vietnam and recognizing what that did to many of our brothers, thousands then, as we tried for decades to push the issues into the public conscious we’d be much more advanced in the understanding of what war and extreme trauma does to the human mind, especially from wars of choice. And it wasn’t only as to our brothers! There also would have been a better understanding as to the civilian populations of these conflicts as well as those anywhere who live through the extreme trauma’s, of many descriptions, that affect individuals in their own lives

Forced to clean up what was left and wasn’t even considered as we sent our soldiers, not into one more failed policy War and long Occupation of others but a second one as well, both still ongoing, both still creating soldiers and veterans, as well as families of, who are owed, more then any previous as they serve in both theaters and multiple tours, adding to all those that preceded and the numbers grow even as us older vets pass on, some getting the help some not and being fought for every step of the way!

Wounded Veterans’ New Fight: The VA

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

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Steve Sack, Comics.com

By now you no doubt read that U.S. Army General Cucolo has issued a policy statement concerning U.S. troops in Iraq; “get pregnant, face possible courts-martial“.

For the first time in history, our troops are to face a courts-martial for getting pregnant?

This begs the question; just who IS in charge in Washington, DC????

Chalk up yet another reason why we have two wars going right now — the U.S. Military is one of the biggest consumers of petroleum products in the world.

And because of this, it is also one of the world’s leading producers of CO2.

As pointed out in this incredible essay, this is the proverbial “elephant in the room”.

(And don’t even get me started on the share of the budget defecit, and the ongoing collapse of the dollar, that the Pentagon is responsible for.  )

Sara Flounders writes:

By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

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The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world.

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Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.

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This information is not readily available … because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change” …

Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency … the Armed Forces of the United States.”

More inconvenient facts:

Professor Michael Klare noted in 2007:

Sixteen gallons of oil. That’s how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes on a daily basis — either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.

And there’s more:

And in 2008, Oil Change International released a report showing that:

The [Iraq] war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.

Between March 2003 and October 2007 the US military in Iraq purchased more than 4 billion gallons of fuel from the Defense Energy Support Center, the agency responsible for procuring and supplying petroleum products to the Department of Defense. Burning these fuels has directly produced nearly 39 million metric tons of CO2 Just transporting 4 billion gallons of fuel to the military in Iraq consumed at least as much fuel as was delivered nearly doubling overall fuel-related emissions.

Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed (but that the Bush Administration struck down).

If the war were ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do, more than 60% of all countries on the planet…

Wow, no wonder the Powers that Be don’t want to put the brakes on this thing.  It’s a paradise for the oil companies, a dream come true.   They take over a country with oil, then spend gargantuan amounts of oil in order to keep the Army there, then when things settle down a bit they just gear up ANOTHER “war” so that they can pump even more and more, all the while charging it to the United States taxpayer.

What a racket.

The wars are rackets.

One hopes that President Obama will strongly and clearly frame our mission in Afghanistan tonight, including the reason for our continued presence in a country that has known wave after wave of outside invaders fighting to advance their own ends.  We are but the latest army to set up shop and increase troop presence in pursuit of an elusive and often invisible enemy force.  The ultimate result is cloudy at this juncture, as was the previous President’s troop surge in Iraq when it was proposed.  I would hasten to call the latter decision an unequivocal success, but it did largely and surprisingly contain a low-grade Civil War.  It is with this fact in mind that many will choke down the prospect of another round of foreign entanglement, troop deployment, and media saturation coverage of major military skirmishes.      

One could, I suppose, reach for an obscure citation describing a similar conflict to which the United States committed troops.  In this situation, however, there are no easy parallels and no conventional warfare nor wisdom to cite.  The Soviet Union’s disastrous nine years in the country might be the best possible comparison under the circumstances, but the peculiarities of that conflict leave it more akin to Vietnam to our current endeavor.  The Soviet War in Afghanistan was an attempt to bolster the existing Communist party from collapsing against the Mujahideen.  We, of course, allocated weaponry and financial support to the Islamic insurgents as a means of undermining the Soviets.  

What has been forgotten in this day is that for nearly fifteen years, the Communist government ruled effectively and made great strides in developing a civilization rather than a backwards state beholden to constant conflict.  With the collapse of the USSR in 1991 came the decline of the Communist state and the rise of the Taliban, which single-handedly destroyed years of reform and plunged the country back into the Dark Ages.  The country deserves lasting stability if it is ever to move forward in time but until it ceases to be a designated battleground, it never will.

Below is just a small group of articles and reports coming in on this Veterans Day 2009. Some about Veterans Day, some about Veterans older and to the present, some about todays Veterans and Soldiers. Much will be said today, much seen, some will even think about, some.

While important it isn’t so much about what will be said or done by our political leaders, it’s really more about how the greater majority in this country who don’t serve, don’t want to really sacrifice, but are quick to use those who do, and their families, then quickly move away from their false meme’s when it comes time to actually heed the calls for the funds to pay for the results of our occupations of choice. And as always by not heeding those calls for sacrifice it ends up causing more suffering by those who’ve suffered enough for country and much much more in the costs of the results of their service!