It's relatively easy to identify the 'tea baggers'. That lady with white hair and a mis-spelled sign? she's got a name. If you ask her, maybe she'll even tell you.
It's easy to identify The politicians who voted for the wars that are going on. The CEO of Goldman-sachs? You know who he is.
But there's another group whose name you will never know. You know what they're called?
WINNERS.
You don't even see their faces. Some kid with a desire to free his country. A guy whose family died in a bus that got shot up by the foreign invaders. A woman whose children were 'collateral damage',which means charred corpses remaining from a 'pre-emptive strike' on a 'suspected insurgent position".
The world has had various name for them.
The British called them 'Upstart Colonials'.
We called them 'patriots'. Some of them we call 'founding fathers'. We know who they are, mostly.
We called them 'Gooks'; they called themselves 'Fighters for a Free Vietnam'.
Now, in 2010, we call them 'insurgents'. But there's a much better name for them, as there was from the beginning of time.
It's 'Winners'.
If you ask them who they are, they'll tell you, "We live here".
Here in Concord, Massachusetts, where the "Shot heard round the world" was fired for freedom. The 'Embattled Farmers' lived there. Unlike the British invaders.
In Vietnam, where four million Vietnamese died. Read that number again. According to Hanoi, the population of Vietnam was almost 60 million at the end of 1985, so they lost an estimated 6.3% of their population in the process of taking their country back from the foreign invaders.
And now, in the Korengal valley. Where a bunch of people we'll never know kicked us out after five years of fighting.
Never heard of the Korengal?
The Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan was a transit route and occasional haven for insurgents, so U.S. commanders decided to drive out the enemy and turn the local villagers into allies. That was in 2005. By this week, after five years of intense combat that cost 42 American lives, U.S. troops had fought their way halfway down the steep-sided, heavily forested valley -- which is just six miles long.
Some called it "The Valley of death". That is what our soldiers called it. Those who made it out. Forty-two of our men didn't.
That's five years and 42 lives for three miles of terrain. On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that U.S. forces are withdrawing from the Korengal, leaving only a small outpost at the mouth of the valley. The Taliban will probably claim a victory over the "infidel" invaders, but the reality is that nobody "lost" the Korengal. The remote declivity doesn't fit into the Obama administration's new strategy of protecting the civilian population. A decision was made that the Korengal simply isn't worth winning.
And what did we accomplish? Well, we made winners of the people who live there, the Korengalis. We certainly united them in their fight against the foreign invaders. They had been friendly in the beginning, but they're not friendly now, at least not to us.
And since to resupply them we spent $400 A GALLON on gasoline alone, we certainly turned the suppliers of war materiel into winners, both American and Afghani. That's a BIG accomplishment. We helped enrich of companies like KBR, the largest supplier to our military.
And we made winners of the local Taliban, who helped the people who live there in their fight against the foreign invaders.
But... but... if there's winners, aren't there losers too?
Go to this site;
http://costofwar.com/
Then go look in the mirror.
Update!!!!!!!
I'm not talking about tea baggers.
Please read the diary.
It's about the futility of war... for those of us who don't have 'defense' stocks... duh