President Obama, on this eve of the 13th Anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, has authorized US airstrikes in Syria in order to curb the progress of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
I find this disheartening, and feel like if we continue to be reactionary, and continue to resort to military force to solve the world’s problems, then the true change that voters like me wanted from President Obama are truly broken promises from 2007.
The military industrial complex, that President Eisenhower warned us of, a warning that Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon did not heed, a warning that Reagan just flagrantly disregarded is now, since 9/11, considered to be the status quo of America’s modern imperialism. It has to stop, because the U.S. cannot afford it, and I’m not willing to pay for it.
Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham both have articulated that this is too much too late, and that the ISIS situation is exacerbated substantially by our withdrawal of occupying forces from Iraq. Both have asserted that a residual security force should have been left behind. The problem is that the examples that they use: Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, are all places where the United States military continues to have a physical presence, and will continue to do so in perpetuity.
If that’s not jurisdictional overreaching, and imperialism at its core, I don’t know what is. We should have listened to Ike. I Like Ike.
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