If Firefighters Fight Fires and Crimefighters Fight Crime, What Do Freedom Fighters Fight?
That’s a George Carlin question that he answers eloquently and with his usual forces of logic. We stopped doing wars a half-century ago. These days we bomb and maim and destroy by a process we call police actions, conjuring up a vision of police-cars, sirens wailing and flashers flashing, pulling up to the scene of the war.
Which is all nonsense, but it’s convenient nonsense.
After the excuse of 9-11, when common sense might have had us pull a bit of diplomatic rank on Saudi Arabia, who counted 17 of the 19 attackers as citizens, we looked elsewhere. Saudi had a lot of oil we hungered over and were a major buyer of our weaponry. Afghanistan? not so much. So, we sallied forth (and fifth and sixth and twentieth) into a nation that had never been conquered, from Hannibal to Russia, to try our hand at freedom fighting.
It turned out the Afghans weren’t much interested. Twenty years later, and at a cost of $10 trillion, we slunk off as losers, tails between our legs (the ones that hadn’t yet …