The US, of course, will continue to deny it and use as the excuse that US troops were fired upon. What is the truth? We cannot know if we are not in the theater of war. What I do know is the US will continue to deploy troops long after troops are needed and where the US goes, it stays, let's face it, for decades or, perhaps, never leaves. One need only to look at Europe and Japan after WWII. We are still there as occupiers perhaps once removed. Will we EVER be totally out of Iraq? Answer: NO. Bin Laden is dead. Will the US pack up from Afghanistan and monitor its actions from afar? Answer: NO.
The US can control a LOT BUT what it cannot control is other variables it cannot calculate into its algorithms of war. Iraq is proof of that. Our neoconservative jackasses thought the invasion of Iraq would be a war to pay for itself, over in matters of weeks and that the Iraqis would greet our soldiers with sweets and flowers. The sweets and flowers never came but civil war did erupting after the mother of all shock-and-awe invasions based on lies flatlined. Not only did the Iraqis not greet us with sweets and flowers they established Shiite control hand-holding with the Shiite mullahs of Iran giving Iran much greater power than it had when they were at war with Sunni Muslim Sadam Hussein’s Iraq from 1980 – 1988. Hussein was even supplied arms by the US.
Moreover, the US could not control the outcome of its Iraq War disaster or a million widowed Iraqi women. It could not control the millions who were refugees into a destabilized Syria with no money and no work many forced into prostitution. If women refugees die from disease or if Syrian security forces jail or kill them it is simply the collateral damage of war. These are expendable people; people who do NOT count.
Moreover, and MOST importantly, pertinent to the headline above, the US cannot control the stability of nations its own Iraq War destabilized, including and most important of all, the nuclear-armed Pakistan. I quote from the December 2011 issue of the Atlantic Magazine:
A country [Pakistan] that is home to the harshest variants of Muslim fundamentalism, and to the headquarters of the organizations that espouse extremist ideologies, including Al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and Lashkar-e-Tayiba, nuclear bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads. And Pakistani and American sources say that since the raid on Abbottabad [in May this year to kill Osama bin Laden], the Pakistanis have provoked anxiety inside the Pentagon by increasing the pace of these movements. In other words, the Pakistani government is willing to make its nuclear weapons more vulnerable to theft by jihadis simply [in a bid] to hide them from the United States, the country that funds much of its military budget".
The actions of the United States of America matter. If the US and its satellite NATO continue to dot the Arab landscape with boots and bombs then we will continue to read alarming bylines stating that Pakistan closed its border to Afghanistan so US troops cannot get supplies.
The US was the nation that pushed for the Nuremberg trials which demanded the individual, when necessary, oppose illegal, unconscionable, inhumane acts of governments even in the theater of war. It did not say with the exception of the US.
I do not want, of course, to sacrifice my own nation or its security but its security is enhanced when the world looks to the US as the penultimate moral compass. Our moral compass has been broken for years and in need of significant repair. It needs a change in direction. If we do not change our direction we become a nation of hypocrites sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
In the Internet age the world watches, the world waits and it listens. America controls a lot but it does NOT control it all!
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/11/26/131396/nato-forces-kill-at-least-24-in.html#ixzz1epvJS3Mn
