© Getmilitaryphotos/ShutterstockFuzzy troops looking for a fuzzy enemy in a fuzzy war.
Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and
displaced.
Yet here at home, there's nothing real about those wars. Here, it's phony war all the way.
In the last 17 years of "forever war," this nation hasn't for one second been mobilized. Taxes are being cut instead of raised. Wartime rationing is a faint memory from the World War II era.
No one is being required to sacrifice a thing.Now, ask yourself a simple question: What sort of war requires no sacrifice? What sort of war requires that almost no one in the country waging it takes the slightest notice of it?
America's conflicts in distant lands rumble on, even as individual attacks flash like lightning in our news feeds. "Shock and awe" campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, initially celebrated as decisive and game changing, ultimately led nowhere. Various "surges" produced much sound and fury, but
missions were left decidedly unaccomplished. More recent strikes by the Trump administration against a
Syrian air base or the first use of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the
MOAB super-bomb, in Afghanistan flared brightly, only to fizzle even more quickly. These versions of the German
blitzkrieg-style attacks of World War II have been lightning assaults that promised much but in the end delivered little. As these flashes of violence send America's enemies of the moment (and nearby civilians) to early graves, the homeland (that's us) slumbers. Sounds of war, if heard at all, come from TV or video screens or Hollywood films in local multiplexes.
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