Jitterbugging for Jesus

The war against ISIS reached a milestone last October when the Pentagon reported that America’s taxpayer-funded bombing campaign had killed an estimated 20,000 ISIS fighters.

That marked a sharp increase from the 15,000 kills the generals and admirals had reported only three months before. (The election was a few days away, by the way.)

Of course, since You-Know-Who came into office–he who as a candidate promised to “bomb the shit out of em”–he’s killed more thousands. (He insists on credit for any and all American kills of bad guys.)

In addition, he, and the U.S. Congress, have granted the Pentagon north of $54 billion more and intensified Obama’s bombing significantly.

The president and Congress (Congress never gets enough credit for feeding the war machine) and the Pentagon are still killing ISIS fighters by the thousands. And it’s not even an election year. Wait till next year!

With the new guy in the White House, the promise is that, soon enough, we’ll see the total elimination of ISIS and the quash of threats from nasty leaders in North Korea and Iran.

Not to mention Afghanistan, where we will soon enough have a 50 percent increase in the almost 10,000 courageous Americans on the ground there.

Those American troops, by the way, will have no clear objective in Afghanistan whatsoever because the White House is winging it with no strategy for anything other than more bombs and troops on the ground.

Obama is still despised for pulling troops out of Afghanistan too soon. In Afghanistan, just a few more thousand boots on the ground here and a few more thousand there is always a winning formula, right?

We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for 16–count em!–16 long years.

And when have we ever had anything to show for it?

How many times have we seen this newsreel since George W. Bush so foolishly injected us into Iraq, a country with the dictator Saddam who U.S. Congressmen had once schmoozed with even after he gassed his own people people. (And here’s a reminder: 14 of the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center Towers were from: Saudi Arabia.)

Remember when, perhaps, you had these stickers all over your car, SUV or pickup in support of President Bush’s plan to invade Iraq at an estimated cost of $60 billion to American taxpayers? That worked out even worse than our allowing freedom fighters in Afghanistan back then fight the Taliban with our few thousand military advisers and a relative few troops on the ground there. And where did all those stickers go?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to achieving world peace.

But I do know that, in the end, war is never really the answer. We maintained 500,000 “boots on the ground” in Vietnam and killed millions of Vietnamese people indiscriminately. And how’d that work out?

We’ve been trying ever since to find a way to win another World War II–the so-called “Good War.” We’re always after another war we can finally feel good about.

So while I don’t know the answers, I know our leaders don’t either.

But I do know the definition of insanity. It’s doing the same stupid, super-expensive and bloody thing over and over, expecting a better result.

The current president can spend all the taxpayer money he wants on more bombs and wars and military “adventures,” just as Obama and Obama’s predecessor and their rubber-stampers in the United States Congress have done since 9-11.

But America’s military might is not going to achieve peace in the Middle East, or anywhere else.

Nor, for that matter, is it going to win the release of Americans still being tortured in North Korea (and Iran) while you-know-who trashes his predecessor yet again for letting a young American die a slow, torturous, sad death.

Constantly trashing Obama, who is no longer the president, doesn’t generate the kind of American solidarity we need to show our enemies. How I wish Donald Trump and others would actually get that rather than blabbing about it.

Our current military strategy, which is so lacking in any end-game strategies that will make any real difference in combatting terrorism and the ideology behind it, is going to do what it’s been doing for 16 long years under several president: create more recruits and “lone wolfs” who want to destroy America and Europe and so much of the supposedly civilized world.

If more and more war, more and more Pentagon spending were the answer to achieving peace and security, we could all tour around Iraq and Syria and other parts of the old Holy Land without fear.

“How long, O Lord?”