I read something a few weeks back about how ISIS in Iraq has commandeered a huge amount of military equipment we paid for with Our Tax Dollars during the 2013 invasion. The supposed “training” of the Iraqi army George W. and Co. said they were doing was a farce and when ISIS emerged, the so-called army cut and ran, leaving billions of dollars of weapons (like humvees at $200,000 a pop) lying around. So now we’re bombing Iraq again and the the billions of dollars of military equipment we paid for are being blowing up by the people we paid to build them in the first place.
Aye yie yie. I’m sure the military industrial complex is drinking up a storm tonight but I’m SMFDH. Our tax dollars down the shit hole, again:
(Image via Wikimedia)
When President Obama announced US airstrikes in Iraq, most observers understood that the US would be bombing members of ISIS. What many did not know was that, in a twist of such bitterly symbolic irony that it could only occur in the Middle East, the US would also be bombing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.
Here’s why: in the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more.
But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.
So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces.
If it weren’t for the military equipment the U.S. walked away from, ISIS wouldn’t be near as powerful and we might not be re-inserting ourselves into that country 11 years after I stood on the protest line doing what I could to stop it because I knew it would be a disaster. But, voila, here we are.
That said, guess who’s on the corporate media? The people who want to make more war.
Geezus.
Filed under: ABC / Disney Media Networks, CBS Inc., CNN / TimeWarner, Fear, Fox "News"/ Fox "Business" /Rupert Murdoch / Wall Street Journal, George W. Bush and Co., Media - General, MSNBC, NBC, CNBC / GE (General Electric), Our Tax Dollars, President Barack H. Obama and Co., Print Media, Religion, Republicans, Including Wingers & "Moderates", Terror, The "Liberal Media", They Think We're Idiots/We ARE Idiots, Wars, We the People
