Diario de un Kamikaze en Recuperación: War Is a Racket

sábado 18 de marzo de 2006

War Is a Racket

I can hardly believe it has been 3 years now since the second War on Iraq was started. There is little in my mind that is as persistent as hearing on the radio, every day: “so many civilians were killed today in an attack near Baghdad...”

As of one year ago, organizations calculated the toll of Iraqi civilian casualties around 100,000.  One-Hundred Thousand.  That’s 25 times the amount of dead from the 9/11 attacks.  And that was a year ago.

What possible justification could any rational person give for this?  That it was for the safety of Americans? For the propagation of democracy and freedom ideals to the Iraqis?

I call bullshit.  And I propose a much simpler explanation: Money.

In my lifetime’s experience, the world revolves around two things: sex and money.  As my good friend Ted Karber once eloquently put it: “As human beings, we either want to buy it or we want to fuck it”.

I wish to God it wasn’t so.  I wish that the actions of individuals and nations revolved around Love instead, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the reality.

War Is a Racket.  I am certainly not the first to say it and any cynic like me probably knows that already.  I first realized this when I was in high school and the first Gulf War was fought.

But at least then nobody pretended it wasn’t about the oil, or making money. And that’s what really rubs my rhubarb: that Bush & Co. would have the gull to say it was about “liberating” the Iraqi people or protecting U.S. citizens.  It kills me that they would render the U.N. useless by proceeding with an unjustified war that the entire world protested and then come back crying as to why they can’t get any support to curb Iran or North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

It pisses me off that the price for getting the U.S. economy out of an imminent recession was a hundred thousand civilian lives.  This kind of thing should not be allowed in the world.

But it does happen.  Nations go to war for money or power.  This has always been the case: from the Crusades, to the World Wars or the Cold War (Vietnam, Korea), take your pick.

If you still don’t believe me, then I would suggest reading Smedley Butler’s—two-time Medal of Honor, Maj. General in the U.S. Marine Corp’s—most excellent essay.  Written around the time of WWI.