Picking Our Next War via Magic 8-Ball

Let me be clear. I won't know where I send troops until I see it on TV.

So, here we are after a decade of America's finest sons & daughters coming home in metal boxes draped with a flag, a flag later dutifully and solemnly folded and handed to a grieving family member with the thanks of a grateful nation, and John McCain and other alleged Great Men are shaking dice in a plastic cup like a Yahtzee Game  or looking at a Magic 8-Ball to see where we'll send troops next.

Steve, you sound like a pacifist. What the hell? That's not like you.

Me, a pacifist? Not bloody likely. I love seeing Bad Guys get a beat down courtesy of the best warfighters the world has ever known. But as a former soldier I am keenly aware of what it's like to be a pawn of Great Men and being the pointy end of the spear. No one longs for peace like a warrior, for the warrior is the one who has the most to lose in war.

What fresh Hell is this? If it's Wednesday it must be Asscrackistan...

 I'm okay with US troops being deployed to hot spots to protect American citizens in danger or to assist good, solid, proven allies in protecting their people. I'm okay with sending US troops to help after a disaster like an earthquake of tsunami. I'm not okay, however, with just sending troops in pell mell every time some Third World crap hole country with a tin pot dictator or Jihadi government says "boo" to us or thumbs its nose at the impotent United Nations. Worse, I am most certainly sure as hell not cool with sending troops into harm's way to satisfy some politician's need to use troops to extend his penis and garner what he thinks is gravitas points.

Hi ho, Hi ho...it's off to war we go. With guns and blades and hand grenades, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho...

I find it ironic that John McCain, the RINO with the biggest horn in Washington, likes to gut immigration reforms that leave our borders unprotected but hawkishly calls for us to scurry into Syria to help topple their government like that's going to make us more secure. Even more ironic is that as a guy who spent years as a POW getting the crap kicked out of him he's always willing to send in the troops if it makes him look more like a prototypical Republican, especially when he needs to score points with Conservatives after he does something progressively liberal to appease potential voters who just vote Dem anyways.

Yeah, after a decade of Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with few tangible results in our favor we've just recently sent a couple hundred troops to Jordan to curb Syrian violence (It hasn't worked) and now Capitol Hill wants to send in more troops and send in arms shipments to equip the rebels. But last time I checked, we were under a sequester, right? They cut military spending because all those babykillers and evil war mongering knuckledraggers are just a drain on the coffers of polite society when that money is better served on welfare and food stamps for baby-mommas and generational lagabouts who vote Democrat because the Dems keep handing them free money.

I digress.

But if we're cutting military spending, with troops seeing tuition assistance cut and public affairs events like annual airshows cancelled, with thousands of federal employees losing hunks of their paychecks due to furloughs, where the hell is the money coming from to magically deploy troops for Syria? Why are we able to cobble together billions in military aid packages to an anti-American Islamist government in Egypt or billions for Pakistan, a country known to harbor Islamoterrorists, a country we routinely drone-strike because of it?

We cut money and punish the military when it suits the whims of politicians and then deploy them to satisfy the whims of politicians. We have troops deployed all over the place and while most of the locations are well-known spots like nearly 30,000 in Korea or 35,000 in Japan or 55,000 in Germany or 20,000 in Italy, or 6,000 or so in Panama, maybe 5,000 in Guam, there are a dozen or more that are less known.

We have a thousand or so people in Cuba at Gitmo even though Obeezy closed it when he took office as promised. Oh wait...no he didn't. He couldn't because we kinda need it to keep scumbags off the streets. We keep 500 or so troops on a rotational basis in Honduras as part of Joint Task Force Bravo. We've got 700 or so out in the Philippines chasing down Islamists there. We have over 3,000 in Djibouti coordinating drone strikes and Special Ops missions. We have at least a hundred in Niger to help the French fighting Islamists in Mali by doing drone recon. For the past year and a half we've been rotating about a hundred Special Forces advisors in and out of Uganda at a cost of about $4.5 million a month to operate in Uganda, South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic, helping to eradicate Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army terror group.

There are already over 1,000 Marines from the USS Kearsarge amphibious group in Jordan on a training exercise, along with 4,000 more from the Army & Air Force, many of whom will be staying behind with their F-16s and Patriot missile batteries after the exercises are over at the behest of the Jordanian government.

We're all up in the 'Stans....Good old Afghanistan, of course, with about 70,000 or so pairs of boots on the ground in addition to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikstan, & Turkmenistan.....plus Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Diego Garcia, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and that good old standby, Iraq. We still have some people in Iraq, even though the average low-information Joe & Jane Voter thinks we completely pulled out. News Flash: while we stopped combat operations there ostensibly and pulled out the majority of our troops in order to continue grinding them up in Afghanistan, things in Iraq have just gone back to random bomb attacks on civilians between rival groups just like the Bad Old Days.

Oh, yeah, before I forget, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Messiah Obeezy (Blessed Be His Name) also has troops at bases on the borders of Bolivia in Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to hunt for drug lords or something like that.

Yeah, we have boots on the ground in more countries than WalMart does, only they're turning a profit doing it while we're pissing away billions to countries that hate us and we're pissing on the countries that actually still do like us. We're over-taxing our troops and wasting resources and giving away billions to be later used against our own people.

Meanwhile, the Obeezy Family is dropping $100 MILLION in our money to vacation in Africa and Ireland and Germany. Another vacation. Another damned vacation. I haven't had anything more than a long weekend away from home since 2007 and those assholes are on ANOTHER mufti-million dollar vacation. In the middle of a sequester. When we're 17 TRILLION in debt. While Americans are still dying in Afghanistan. (But Americans dying overseas is no big deal to Obama. Look at Benghazi...)

But Obama won't know he's on vacation till he sees it on the news, I guess.