Just love those laser guided bombs, they’re really great for righting wrongs. You hit the target and win the game from bars 3,000 miles away.
3,000 miles away.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range.
Roger Waters, Amused to Death
There seems to be a theme occurring in conservative circles these days. Whether it’s conservative twitter users attacking the President on his newly opened Twitter account, or the various and sundry nutjobs attempting to woo the the right wing of US politics into voting for them. The theme is talking tough when you believe yourself to be safely out of reach.
The Twitter users who threatened the President are going to discover that the illusion of anonymity that comes from tweeting in your underwear from mom’s basement isn’t nearly as real as the Secret Service who will shortly be looking for them (I’d suggest they put some pants on and find a decent attorney. They will need both items) but the politicians who are anxious to send our children back into harms way are safe from the costs of their sabre rattling.
Or so they assume.
Generally that is a safe assumption; that the instigators of war, the agitators for war if they are members of government, are safe from the conflicts they cause. This is especially true if the wars they start are the kinds that amount to a bully throwing his weight around on a playground. The bully generally wins; he’s bigger, stronger, more aggressive. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes the little guy has teeth he’s not afraid of using. Tricks he can utilize.
We’ve already seen what our bullying (military adventurism) can cost us. The attacks on 9-11 were a direct, predictable (and predicted) result of our bullying around the world. We trained fighters in Afghanistan. When they had completed the job we wanted, pushing the then USSR out of their country, we abandoned them and Afghanistan to what became the Taliban. Instead of providing support for our allies, funds to rebuild their country, we turned elsewhere and left them to fend for themselves. So they did what they knew how to do. Fight, guerrilla style. Train others to fight in this fashion. Spread their anti-US rhetoric to the sympathetic ears in other regions.
We confirmed their beliefs about us when we handed Kuwait back to the royal family there, intervening in a conflict we really had no business getting involved in. We could have done right by the common people in both places. The average Afghani or Kuwaiti, but we didn’t bother with seeing to their welfare any more than we bother to see to the welfare of average Americans in our midst, to our great shame and detriment. There will be hell to pay for all of this someday in the future.
