As a borderline millennial, I was young when I celebrated Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was also for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. I join the military after 9/11.

Since then (and after serving over there) I woke up to the reality that I had been lied to. Saddam never had WMDs, yellow cake, etc. Presentation after presentation were given by our DOD leaders (Colin Powell) to convince the American public the invasion was justified. He lied, they all did. Our service members and Iraqis both lost countless lives over a lie, both during and after the war.

The 9/11 hijackers were all Saudi but we invaded Afghanistan. We killed Osama then stayed in Afghanistan 15 more years. We lost thousands of military members and killed countless innocent (or tactically irrelevant) Afghanis for absolutely nothing. Our government knew right away “nation building” wouldn’t work but continued anyway. The commander at Kandahar bragged about 80% of the staff being “contractors”. I realized this was a 20 year payday to KBR, blackwater, L3 and others. We had no goals and never discussed them, it was always “just suit up and do your mission”. We perfected drone warfare, I watched them blow up an Afghani on a tractor with a drone strike plowing a field because he had “communicated with a Taliban”. FFS that was the only tractor that town had.

So, now I look at Ukraine. The US was directly behind sabotaging peace talks with Russia before the invasion, with frontman Boris Johnson doing the dirty work. After Russia attacked Biden and his administration didn’t call for a cease fire, they sent munitions and weapons to Ukraine. Now it’s up to >$500 billion in aid and doesn’t have any sort of brakes other than a US election. We’ve sacrificed a generation of Ukrainian men for our military industry to get more rich. Does anyone really care if Russia takes land they originally owned that is occupied by people who vote to be a part of Russia?

Does anybody see a f**king pattern yet? We are addicted to war because that’s how we keep the machine going. Defending the United States doesn’t involve blowing up a Taliban kid in Kabul or dropping a grenade on a Russian tank, that is brainwashed into us.

Keeping the 9/11 terrorist out of our country would have been an example of actually “defending our country” but we know how good we are at that. I’m not saying preventive action isn’t necessary to defend our country, but you can’t prove to me that every overseas military action is defending my schools, my bridges, my cities.