Some quotes from Stan Goff, retired Delta Force seargent, who sounds a lot like Marine General Smedly Butler.
truthout.org
"soldiers are natural political scientists, because politics can be a matter of life or death to them."
"Bush is making more politically fatal mistakes than I can count ... His so-called build-up of the military is one of them. He is not in fact building up the military, he is building up the weapons industry"
"... there was a common denominator that it took me a couple of decades to figure out. We were engaged in conflicts against poor people. I didn’t realize it at the time – Haiti was the watershed actually – but this is the military role in an imperial state. "
"While the national chambers of commerce in these places, with their eager compradors, assisted US corporations to drain the value out of these countries, the military’s job, often through the surrogate militaries of the host nation as we called it, is to stand guard against all those masses of people in the host nation from whom the value was being drained in labor and resources. If you steal enough from people, they hit a point where they become rebellious, and to continue stealing, you have to use people with guns.
Aside from that sort of macro-analysis, one thing that stands out in my mind is how badly many of the operations went, and how important it is for the US military to spend huge sums of money on arms and high technology. Grenada and Somalia are examples. Real emblems of stupidity in planning and execution." |
