Endless wars create an endless stream of veterans, who as you see in “What I Want You To Know,” are left questioning whether their sacrifices led to something better.
War, and its sister war in Iraq, were glaring cesspools of corruption, fraud and waste that succeeded only in enriching corrupt officials, empowering warlords and profiting arms and development companies while building governments and armies that were nothing more than houses of cards.
Our leaders…say they want peace. And they’re all lying.
When the ICC began the process of investigating American war crimes in Afghanistan, the Trump administration sanctioned members of the ICC. The Biden administration dropped those sanctions, but they have made clear that they will not participate in the ICC.
y the time the last American troops leave Afghanistan in 2021, there are almost ten times as many contractors as there are American soldiers
No matter how moral you think you’re going to be…that morality is going to be crushed by the overall immorality of the war.
“The problems I identified on a microscale in Afghanistan still exist on a macroscale in American foreign policy,” Edstrom said. “That is detrimental to not only soldiers, but to Americans, and the world.”
Rather than celebrating Veteran’s Day, I wish we could celebrate Armistice Day or, you know, the end of all war as we know it. That would be wonderful. I would much rather like to live in a world without conflict.
The unfortunate truth is that we don’t.
We have not rid the world of war. It continues in its small scale fashion at this very moment in conflicts all around the world.
Across recent administrations, one thing has remained consistent: deception about the Afghan War. Veteran Matthew Hoh joins host Chip Gibbons on episode eight of the podcast “Primary Sources” to discuss the decades of American intervention in Afghanistan and Hoh’s personal experience as a whistleblower—which was met with fierce pushback from the Pentagon.