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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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You know what really baked my noodle? I was a big WW2 nerd and then we went to war when I was a teenager. Where were the ration cards? Where was the society at war? The entire thing was just this low hum in the background. A thing you could choose to ignore. You could ignore it all. That's not how you fight a war if you want to win it. That's how you fight war if you want it to just make money for war industry. And then (I know, I know) my friends went over and got shot at and made a third, or a quarter, what blackwater mercs were making. I was like "what the fuck is this? You could have 3 or 4 more guys for every one of these warjoy trigger happy dipshits. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?"
They flubbed it. They fucked it all up intentionally. Just so contractors could make more money. Kickbacks. Half a million people dead for their boondoggle. The Iraq War truly is what radicalized me. "War is a racket" and all that jazz but that war, that fucking war, it was a smash and grab, it was pure gangster capitalism. Sorry I'm kinda rambling here but that's why I don't see the US military winning a knockdown drag out fight. Not if it's that kinda military. Doing it right, making do with limitations? Not enough profit to skim. Not enough fat to trim. So no wonder they skew the war games to prop up the illusion. It's cheaper that way. And that money saved? It can get siphoned off by the MIC if it gets tested in battle.
Edit: What I'm trying to say is you can either have a military designed to make money or you can have one designed to win wars. You can't have it both ways. And we all know the way the USA has chosen.
The reason they didn't go for full on WW2 rationing or the draft or anything is they saw the public backlash after Vietnam. Wars need to be sold to the US public as some hazy far off thing that doesn't directly affect their lives. They're fine with people over there being killed for profit, as long as it doesn't inconvenience them personally.
Yes, and I remember how they didn't even allow filming the caskets coming home like they did in Vietnam, to say nothing of actual combat footage on the nightly news. That's how "over there" they tried to make it. Goddamn... it was so fucked up.
The prevailing theory regarding the media coverage (or lack thereof) is they felt 'guilty' over how they 'altered the American people's perception of the Vietnam War unfairly', which...lol.
That is partly why a lot of things went unquestioned, why they started (and continue) to just swallow State Department talking points whole; it's not like Vietnam was significantly better, but they actually reported on what was happening now and then, instead of just fobbing off the troops 24/7. Of course, they also took a wildly paternalistic view of the Iraqi/Afghani people, I remember when they helped pull down one of those statues of Saddam that he had near his palace (?), the whole tone was "oh these poor Iraqis need our help, they don't know how to do this".
The crowd around that statue when it got pulled down was like 90% journalists. It was pure theater. At the time I was laughing at the idea that Europe is full of statues of profoundly evil men but they just kinda deal with it. Like "oh that's just Charles the Awful, he killed a thousand babies, now pigeons shit on him no big deal." But the media had to have their "I'm doing my part!" gesture to the state department.