Day: November 16, 2015

I am a huge fan of American soldiers. While not all are the strong men and women we think of as fighting the good fight for our nation, enough of them are the selfless, valiant individuals that we can honestly feel good about soldiers as a whole. The military on the other hand is a steaming mess of corruption and mismanagement. Still, at the end of the day we are held responsible not for the mess that is the military, but for the image of power our soldiers project. This is the condition that leads to us being held responsible, and often believing we are responsible for what is happening in the Middle East.

To recognize the corrupt and outright mismanaged state of the U.S. military, look no further than the $43 million dollar gas station we built for cars that don’t even exist. The best part is that a similar station cost the Pakistani government only $500,000 to build. No, wait, the best part is that the military can’t find anyone to answer how or where the other 42.5 million was spent.

We dump so many lives and resources into the region that you would think we would have made some form of progress in forming a lasting positive relationship in the areas we do the most spending and fighting. Wrong again. In truth, these regions are the same regions where ISIL is gaining the most ground. Now, in the wake of the Paris attacks, a great deal of the blame is being placed on the shoulders of President Obama and his rhetoric about ISIL. That, I believe, is the fault of American Military exceptionalism. Because we feel our might is beyond match and question, we also feel that it is our responsibility to use that might to control a region that hasn’t seen lasting peace since, well, ever.

Peter’s Uncle Ben would be proud.

Let’s face facts: Nobody can win a war in that region because there is no such thing as winning. Once you control one region, another flares up with the largely sectarian violence common to the region since its inception. This is not a problem we can fix with drones or soldiers. In fact, the latest reason we’ve been given for being there is to keep the battle from crossing our borders, as if the biggest threat on the planet is taking place in this tiny collection of countries. We’ve given the terrorists so much social power that no military officer or political figure can sneeze without running into someone who wants to know what they plan to do about terrorism.

Its a problem that needs a new solution. One solution might actually be to pull out of the region completely. Let them handle their own wars as they prefer. Only, we are too strong of a military to ever allow that.

I wrote the Some Thoughts first. I didn’t have anything else to say really. When emotionally drained I find that I have little to put on the page. I have to charge up. I have to get to feeling out the world and seeing what there is to speak on. Sometimes I find a hot topic or a thread I am so anxious to pull. Other times I find myself staring at the timer and hoping for a brief bit of solace in:

Some Thoughts:

1. I have this student who by all accounts has no business going to college at this point in his life. He’s obsessed with Rob Gronkowski. He knows that I’m a Giants fan and will find a way to strike up a conversation about Gronk as he does every week. He will do it with a certain level of smugness this week, comfortable in the knowledge that the Patriots stole one off the G-men today. Kudos for you, buddy. Kudos.
2. I’m not in a very writerly way today.
3. I was have convinced I should just drop these random thoughts, because that is all I could spool up once I started the timer, so I started with these in the hope something more would manifest.
4. Four minutes into the post and nothing has managed to manifest, save for 134 words of nothingness. Some days are like this in the writer’s life. Some days are far more prolific.
5. I have been thinking about the upcoming slate of kids sports. I’ve been thinking that I place way too much importance on such things, as if keeping them in sports is the only way to keep them off the couch. Perhaps it is the one way to keep me off the couch.
6. Four minutes left and I still find myself sliding deeper into the nothingness of drivel words; empty words meant to keep the fingers moving and the brain spooling up, but at this late hour there is little left to spool. I suppose I should, at this point, cut to the beginning and construct some form of excuse as to why things are the way they are