If military veterans are dangerous, it’s because they feel betrayed.
Why, despite decades of disastrous wars, do Pentagon budgets continue to grow, year after year, like ever-expanding nuclear mushroom clouds?
America doesn’t lack toughness — it lacks smarts. Selling more weapons to Ukraine or Taiwan isn’t the answer. Nor are constant threats.
It’s easy to be gung-ho about the military. It’s also easy, I think, to dismiss military service with extreme prejudice.
America worships its Pentagod and the weapons and wars that feed it.
The United States has been embroiled in “nonstop war” since 9/11, fueled by an astonishing funding of the military-industrial complex and pursuit of never-ending conflicts overseas.
Retired lieutenant colonel William Astore argues in TomDispatch that we have all become “American POWs,” while brave whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who expose what is being done in our names and with our money, are left to suffer “grim fates.”
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