Young men and women in the United States Military have been fighting other people’s wars for quite a long time.
In Iraq alone, after the people there complained about their dictator while just living with him, we went in on debatable grounds and got stuck in a war for quite a few years saying we would leave when the Iraqi people were trained enough to take care of themselves.
But we would keep on fighting until they were.
I went to a type of boarding school for high school. We had to do all the work on the campus except those things that could only be done by certified trades people like plumbers and electricians. But in most everything else, we did the work.
A senior on a work crew would usually be the boss, especially if the crew was all freshmen.
On one work detail my freshman year we had a senior who was pretty impressed with himself being the boss, and overly played his role. He would give orders to begin one task before we were finished with the one we were doing, and he threatened to report anyone to the priest in charge if he thought any of us was being insubordinate. He issued orders just to issue them, and believed it was his obligation to do so as he was the boss.
This was getting frustrating, not only because we wanted to finish one thing before starting another, but we knew we would get our butts chewed because by the end of the work period it would appear we could not, or were too lazy to complete a simple task.
My closest friend in my class, a kid we called Peachy for reasons I cannot remember, or Le Peche if the occasion called for us to be a little more high class, got tired of this routine, and requested that Franny, our crew chief, show him how to do each task he was assigned. The more he pretended not to understand what it was exactly that he was being told to do, the more of the task Franny would compete while angrily showing this stupid kid how to do it.
The end result was that by the time Peachy acknowledged that he had grasped his task, the task was completed. On that particular day, Franny was so angry with Peachy that he didn’t realize what was being done, and Peachy, while appearing to want to do what he was assigned, while acknowledging his own mental denseness, never did any work.
When the priest in charge gave us kudos for a job well done by allowing us to be first to the post work “bug juice” line, Peachy was included in the group. He got the praise and benefits without having done the work.
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To me the people of Iraq were a population of Peachies. Why should they actually become totally trained, or acknowledge when they were, if the United States would continue to send its own troops over to get killed in their place while they reaped the benefits without the sweat.
So, we would train ours, send them over to fight, and they would return, dead, wounded, suffering PTSD, and, if healthy, easy enough to ignore because they were no longer in uniform or attractive as photo ops.
Sit back and let Americans do the work.
At the hearings dealing with the confirmation of Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary, John McCain made a statement that, I have to admit, I found a little shocking.
When Carter did not go so far as to say that we should take out the air force of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help Syrian rebels fighting both his regime and Islamic State, Senator McCain objected by saying,
“You really didn’t respond, in all due respect, Dr. Carter, to sending young Syrians in, training them in Saudi Arabia and sending them into Syria to be barrel-bombed by Bashar Assad. The morality of that alone, much less the workability of it, is in contradiction to everything the United States ever stood or fought for.”
Wait. What?
It is immoral to send Syrians back into Syria after they are trained to fight for what they want in Syria where they might get killed, but it has never been immoral to send our troops into foreign countries after they are trained to die fighting for what the people in that country should be fighting for?
Our soldiers can die and it’s okay, but if theirs do, it’s immoral for us to have sent them home to die fighting in their own country for what they want?
Please tell me that I have read too much into McCain’s statement on morality.