This Is the World We Have Chosen

Today is Thursday, 6 June 2013.

"Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the enigmatic figure at the center of the worst American war crime in recent memory, admitted for the first time on Wednesday [to] deliberately killing 16 Afghan civilians last year, most of them women and children."  [The New York Times, 6 June 2013]

Staff Sgt. Bales had suffered a traumatic brain injury and PTSD, yet the command structure continued his combat deployment.  In a military court, Staff Sgt. Bales said, "There's not a good reason for why I did the horrible things I did."  His memory of the killings is only partial.

This is what we must expect.  Soldiers with brain injuries, who are forced back into combat, are subjected to stresses far beyond that of other soldiers.

This is not the case, of course, with their civilian commanders.  In this instance, the War Against Afghanistan has been fought on the cheap, since the real interest of the Bush-Cheney/Cheney-Bush regime was the Conquest of Iraq, in what was supposed to be a walk-over war which would secure overwhelming American hegemony in the Middle East for many decades to come.

Didn't quite work out that way.

While Bush and Cheney and their minions prepared a war of aggression (a high crime under the Nuremberg Principles), their lives went on as before:  instead of Meals Ready to Eat and canteens of field-purified water, the Aggressors feasted and swilled Champagne.  They should be serving life in prison, not such as Staff Sgt. Bales.

But then, this is the world we have chosen.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/us/sergeant-robert-bales-testimony.html?_r=0]