By Dave LIndorff

Merry Xmas Jarheads!! The Man of Peace, Nobel Laureate-to-be
President Barack Obama, your latest commander-in-chief, is going to be
shipping you out as a holiday gift to the people of Afghanistan.

You will be delivering bullets and bombs, with my name and the name
of other American taxpayers on them, to the long-suffering people of
Afghanistan by December 25, according to press reports ahead of the Mr.
Hope and Change’s planned nationwide speech tonight.

Back here in America, the land of the free and brave, come the
holidays, we will be scraping together the cash to buy small gifts for
our kids, hopefully without having to miss a rent payment or a mortgage
payment. Fortunately, we’ve got Food Stamps, which are now, we are
told, flooding the suburbs, and are “no longer a stigma,” so we won’t
be hurting too much for Christmas dinner—though you still can’t use the
stamps to buy eggnog.

It will be interesting to hear what your commanders tell you your
mission is. The president is saying we need to keep Al Qaeda out of
Afghanistan, but from what I hear, there are no Al Qaeda operatives in
the country. They all upped and left for greener pastures a long time
ago—to places like Pakistan, Somalia, and maybe Europe and the USA.
Hell, they can go anywhere. How do you spot an Al Qaeda guy anyhow? The
fellows getting on the plane in Boston on 9-11 were clean-shaven and
wore Brooks Brothers shirts, looking more like bond traders than
bombers.

No, you will be targeting the Taliban. But the Taliban are Afghans,
and look just like the people who are not Taliban, so what you’ll most
likely be doing half the time or more is shooting up ordinary
struggling Afghani peasants and shopkeepers, or members of weddings or
funerals, whose angry relatives will then seek revenge by setting traps
or ambushes for you.

From what I hear, we taxpayers will be forking over about $1 million
for each of you for each year you are rotated into Afghanistan. You
won’t see much of that money yourself of course, (most of the dough
will flow to the war-profiteers who make your uniform, your gun, your
ammo, your truck, etc.), but maybe it will feel good knowing that
there’s that big an investment being made in you.

You’ll be called “our heroes,” too. I’m not sure why. I mean, it
takes a certain amount of guts just to sign up for an outfit like the
Marines, I know (my dad volunteered to be a Marine in WWII). But I just
find it hard to see what’s so heroic about being part of the
best-armed, best-trained fighting force in the history of mankind and
fighting a group of poor, uneducated peasants armed at best with AK
rifles and home-made bombs—especially when you guys reportedly
outnumber your enemy by better that 10:1, and have the backing of
completely unchallenged air support—F-16s, helicopter gunships,
fixed-wing gunships and B-1 bombers.

That’s not a fight. It’s a slaughter.

I had a taste of this when I brought my son and a friend of his to
the Army Experience Center, an recruiting experiment in Northeast
Philadelphia where we were able to man a mock-up Humvee and race
through a simulated village, firing our mounted machine guns at
supposed Taliban fighters who would jump out at us, or plant IEDs in
our path. At the end of the run, we were congratulated by the attending
Iraq War vet/recruiter, for our number of kills and our low (25%)
“error” rate—that was the number of civilians, usually women or kids,
that we shot up in our haste to shoot first. We were told that such
“collateral damage” was to be expected in war.

Merry Christmas Afghanistan!

Barack Obama says you’re just going there to stabilize Afghanistan
and keep the Taliban at bay long enough for the people of Afghanistan
to come up with a real government and for an army to be trained to take
over from you.

We heard a faery-tale like that from another “peace” president,
Lyndon Johnson. He gave his speech announcing plans to send two Marine
and seven Army divisions to Vietnam at Easter, saying they were just
going to be protecting the people and allowing the South Vietnamese
government to upgrade its military so it could take over the fight
against the other Vietnamese who were trying to overthrow it. A decade
later some 2 million of those Vietnamese people were dead, mostly at
the hands of our “heroes.”

Happy Easter, Vietnam.

So when you’re over there, try to kill as few of the poor Afghanis
as you can. That would be a genuine act of heroism. Or just refuse to
go. That would even be more heroic still.

Don’t believe your commander-in-chief when he says you are defending
America over there. I’m confident that you’ll see pretty quickly once
you get there that the notion that those poor people could be in any
way a threat to this nation is beyond ludicrous.

No, what you’ll be defending is Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack
Obama’s scheme to look tough on defense, and to be able to kick the can
of this ugly, pointless war down the road past the 2012 election
without having to run as the “president who lost Afghanistan.” You’ll
be defending his goal of winning campaign contributions from the big
military contractors like Boeing and Northrup Grumman. You’ll be
defending the myriad members of Congress who cast gutless and foolish
votes back in 2001 to endorse President George Bush’s and Vice
President Dick Cheney’s declaration of a Global War on Terror—a fake
“war” that has now been adopted by President Obama.

Good luck over there in the Hindu Kush. I hope you don’t get killed
or hurt, but at the same time, I cannot say I wish you success, because
success, as defined by your commander-in-chief, appears to mean the
slaughter of many innocent Afghanis, and the further entrenchment of a
brutal narco-state government in one of the poorest nations in the
world.

No, my wish for you is that you and your buddies come home soon, and do as little killing as possible before you do.

Merry Christmas.
_____________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work
is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net