The Abandonment of Friends

You go to war with the government you have. To even suggest that we can find a peaceful solution to this pre-Armageddon intelligence failure is insane. After years of American forces in Iraq only 500 to 700 hundred Iraqi troops can protect themselves and others. After several years of American forces in Iraq how many terrorists have we created or drawn to the area? More than 500 to 700. A large majority of the world’s terrorists were either financed or trained by the United States, so why would we be so upset when they become disgruntled when we as the employer abandon the employee?


“Abraham Lincoln’s belief that the United States was “the last best hope on earth” seemed an invocation not just of the Republican dream, but of a burdened world at last set materially free.”
Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound


And what of that last hope, are as Andre Gregory stated in the film, My Dinner With Andre, that the “sixties represented the last burst of the human being.” Over wrought with their childhood the baby boomer generation romanticizes the turmoil of that generation and cannot see the forests of Iraq and South Africa, of Rwanda or Darfur for the trees of a once promised Eden, a last best hope of a tranquil overcoming of peace on earth or peace with honor. When speaking from the heart the soul gets clouded and experiences weather it cannot explain. The generation that would end the war, the generation that could begin the environmental movement, somehow lost sight of the militancy and the engendered response. Now the same generation trains other generations to kill, to commit acts of aggression. Where’s the love in war? The only rainbows in this troubled planets future watch over the dead and then dissipate until the hard rain comes again.

- Chris Mansel