Hello, America of 2024! This is Brian Hurt, writing you from the far distant past of late 2014. Last night, President Obama just started bombing Iraq. Again. The failure of this bombing to dismantle ISIS has not happened yet. Not has the failure of the intervention of the arabic soldiers. The "limited" commitment of American soldiers hasn't happened yet, nor has it's failure, nor the resulting surges, comitting ever larger numbers of US troops to the area, nor their failures. The unending stream of flag draped coffins has not (yet) started to return to the US, nor the even larger number of damaged and disabled veterans.
I write this to you, because in the far distant future of 2024, my era of 2014 is as distant and poorly remembered to you as the year 2004 is distant and poorly remembered to me. Distance in time erases memory, and the justifications of one age are lost to the mists after a passage of so many years. This letter is my attempt to answer the question you are probably asking yourself- what were we thinking?
The first thing you Americans of 2024 need to understand is that, from our perspective here in 2014 this is not a war of choice. Sure, from the perspective of 2024 this may seem like a war we could have skipped with few consequences, but I have just watched Chris Matthews on the liberal MSNBC assure me that we have no choice. They (ISIS) have beheaded a few Americans, and worse yet, posted the videos to youtube, and this is an insult we can not ignore.
Now, you might say "but Brian, are a few beheaded Americans worth having hundreds or thousands of Americans die, and thousands more be maimed?" Ah, but you see, to us that hasn't happened yet. The inevitability of that happening, of us being drawn into the exact same quagmire our fore fathers of a decade ago were drawn into, literally is not crossing our minds. We are not thinking that bombing from the air has never managed to destroy a popular political movement, and that it's failure and the failure of successive policies of greater engagement might happen. We haven't "connected the dots", as my grand pappy from 2004 might have said.
Oh, I should mention, back here in 2014, "literally" still means "in a literal sense" or "exactly", it doesn't mean "figuratively". Or, at least, not yet.
The reason we're not thinking that the air campaign we just launched may fail is because no one is talking about it. The questions that you in 2024 think we here in 2014 should be asking simply aren't being asked. Even on the liberal news show, no alternative to war is being presented- I can only imagine what it's like on Fox News (it's still legal for use here in 2014 to not watch Fox News). Those of us who do question the rationales are limited to writing snarking blog posts, and have no influence in the decision making.
And, let's be blunt. We here in 2014 need to a little war to distract us. See, the economy still isn't so great. Yeah, I know the failure of us here in 2014 to pass meaningful financial reform led to a second economy collapse and a new depression, but again, that's in our future here in 2014. We still have stories passed down to us about a time known as the "nineties" when the economy was healthy and jobs were plentiful. So we feel bad about our bad economy and need some distraction.
I write this letter to you, the Americans of the distant future of 2024, in the hope that something of my time might survive. Historians here in 2014 have recently uncovered evidence of a long-distant war known as "Viet Nam" (that might be just one word, I'm not sure), which has amazing parallels to the war we ourselves have just launched- an extensive but ultimately futile aerial bombing campaign, the use of unreliable local forces, an originally limited involvement of ground forces that was constantly upgraded across multiple different administrations of different parties, all of which resulted in nothing but pain and failure. And I wonder what the people of that era could have told me. Or what the people of 2004 could have told me. And I hope that maybe, somehow, you in 2024 could learn from our history, and maybe avoid the same mistake we're making.
Also, I'd like to apologize for the whole "Expendables" thing. We just thought it was a nice vehicle for aging action-adventure stars. We never thought it would become an actual thing.