War is good for nothing unless you're a contractor

This photo of wounded Iraq War veteran Ty Ziegel and his bride, Renee Kline, was taken by Nina Berman. Ziegel was burned after a suicide bomber blew himself up by his truck in Iraq. After months in the hospital, he returned home and married his high school sweetheart. A few months later, the couple divorced.


There are two things that instantly raise my blood pressure and put me in an unbelievably foul mood the second I think about them: 1) Anita’s psychopathic ex-husband, and 2) the fact that my country is waging endless war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan and not enough people give a sh*t.

I’m not writing about the former because it’s Anita’s business and it’s too personal.

The latter, however, is everyone’s business. Everyone’s paying, and not just financially. There’s a moral debt being incurred here – the kind that won’t be erased by helping old ladies across the street or warming a pew for a few consecutive Sundays.

We’re spending money we don’t have and robbing our children’s future and killing innocent human beings. We’re destroying families and villages and livelihoods and marriages and hope. We’re trashing our nation’s reputation and creating fertile breeding grounds for hatred and terrorism and making it so we’ll never be able to fly to Cincinnati without taking our shoes off before boarding the plane. We’re killing people’s sons and daughters. We’re relegating our youth to scarred, limbless lives, to wheelchairs and veteran’s hospitals, to closed doors and alcoholism and nightmares that won’t end. For what?

Where’s the outrage? Where’s the media assault? Why aren’t we forcing – literally forcing – politicians to bring our soldiers home before doing anything – anything – else? Why aren’t we demanding that Barack Obama send his Nobel Peace Prize back to Oslo on the next flight?

The total cost of both wars since 2001, as of this moment, is $1,199,438,362,683.

The tab for the Iraq war stands at $792,093,672,547; Afghanistan comes in at $407,345,258,772.

We’re spending more than a trillion dollars on unjustifiable wars and our elected officials are wrangling over what to cut in the federal budget. We’re mortgaging the future of the United States and no one has the time to march in the streets or write to their representatives or fill the airwaves with indignation. No one’s trying to levitate the Pentagon or hold sit-ins or burn anything. Men and women and boys and girls are dying in Fallujah and Haditha and Tikrit and Kabul and Kandahar and some people can't even be bothered to vote.

Cindy Sheehan camped out near Dubya’s “ranch” in Crawford, Texas, for a while a few years ago but she became the butt of Jay Leno’s jokes rather than the leader of a revived anti-war movement. It’s a mystery to me why a mother who was trying to draw attention to the fact that she dressed her son in his best suit, placed him in a casket and buried him under six feet of dirt for no clear reason became an object of ridicule.

Sheehan lost her child and we have no shame.

I remember marching on a cold day back in 2003 with millions of others around the world to protest the possibility of war with Iraq. The United States bombed Baghdad the following month. Is this why we shrug our shoulders now and let Halliburton, Congress and others steal our money and our souls? Because we tried for one day to stop something and it didn’t work?

The next politician who claims to support our troops but has done nothing to bring them home had better be thankful that I’m on medication.


Source: costofwar.com