The pretense is over. President Obama has taken on the mantle of an official war presidency.
Unlike his predecessor, who spoke to us with a perpetual smirk on his face as if all of life was a game -- which for him, it was -- President Obama speaks to us with a slippery tongue, forked with deceptions and equivocations that mislead us into thinking of nobility and higher purpose.
What the President didn't say with his latest troop surge is that the already psychologically strained military we all supposedly care about will be either forced into multiple tours of duty in the war zone, or somehow, somewhere, fresh new bodies will need to replace them. Where will these troops come from? Isn't it just grand that official unemployment is 10 percent, with actual unemployment closer to 17 percent? Isn't it grand that the economic recovery is a new financial bubble rather than a recovery of actual jobs? We won't need a draft because there are plenty of grunts around to kill and die for Obama's noble cause.
The President also didn't acknowledge that his war morality is continuous with the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. In other words, our military is no longer fighting actual wars of defense against active threats to our national security. Rather, we are now fighting wars that we think might possibly one day be a threat to our national security "interests." That is, we will kill for the right to plunder the world for strategic economic gain that will enhance the bottom line of the corporate-military government that runs our nation. The grunt that does the killing is just a usable asset, of no account after his function as a soldier is over. Don't believe me? Then why is veteran homelessness increasing? Why the silence about the suicide rate and divorce rate of our veterans? Why the lack of urgency to put people back to work? The truth is that none of us care too much about supporting the troops. We are all collectively guilty in the blood they shed, and in the immorality of their cause.
The President also did not acknowledge that Afghanistan itself is a false front masking the covert, internationally illegal invasion undertaken by the CIA and corporate-privatized armies (think Blackwater/Xe) that are actively engaged in Pakistan. This is what our nation has become: as bullies we go into countries and break them, then we have to fix up the consequences of what we have broken. We are a nation of permanent war with no greater meaning, nor higher purpose than the financial profit of a few.
I feel like Jonah, whose only hope was to say, "yet 40 days."