We lost every game except for one.
The one victory we enjoyed was because the other team forfeited.
Granted, the problem may not have been with the strategy. The problem may have been in the quality of our offense… we were pretty bad. Not to mention that we had 14 freshman and sophomore boys, playing 11 man football. Not much time to rest when almost everyone is starting offense, defense, and special teams.
Apparently, my JV football coach must have learned his strategy from the U.S. government. Unlike our football team, the U.S. government has no shortage of talent or resources.
With military bases filled with active personnel in approximately 90% of the nations of the world, and spooks (those undercover executing black ops) in 100% of the nations of the world, the Department of Defense may need to consider a name-change. DoD and DIA (the Defense Intelligence Agency) are busy carrying out their defense orders all over the globe, but we ought to ask, is it really defense?
The answer is troubling either way.
If not, then the obvious question for military strategists would be, “Then what are we doing on offense!?” I would suspect that very few people like to identify themselves as devout imperialists. Neither would many be willing to admit to being militarists. Empire is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit as a tool of polemicists in political literature and debates. But if what U.S. “defense” agencies are doing overseas is not defense, we need to face up to the reality that empire is creeping up on us all over the world.
If what the U.S. is doing overseas is defense, I fear that the conclusion is even more sobering. If this is the case, the reality of empire is not approaching… it is here. If the US has a military presence all over the world, and that military is on the defensive, this suggests that the U.S. sees all of those regions as its own. When “leaders” in any of those regions step out of line and do not comply, rumors of heavy U.S. troop deployment begin to echo through the grapevine.
“But what about 9/11!? We need to be defended from another attack like that!”
15 of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi Arabian. None were from Iraq. All intelligence seems to point to the fact that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before the U.S. invasion.
Also, though I can understand reasons (namely vengeance) behind the support to invade Afghanistan, I am compelled by the teaching of Jesus to wonder what would have happened if people expressed a mass forgiveness toward the orchestrators and perpetrators of the egregious acts of violence on 9/11/01. Perhaps that would have been a more disarming course than the one we took. Instead, the continued U.S. military presence has now sparked a swelling anti-occupation movement comparable to the anti-Soviet sentiment that united Afghans against their communist occupiers in the 1980’s.
I am currently reading a novel “Operation Dark Heart” written by a black ops professional who spent a number of years in Afghanistan. Though I don’t agree with his view on war, espionage, or much else, much of what he says in his book is quite enlightening. Apparently it was a bit too enlightening for the taste of the DoD and DIA. Even though he had the content cleared by the Department of the Army, the DoD and DIA made a massive amount of last minute edits that left large portions of many pages blacked out.
All that to say, when my infatuation with Jesus, the Jewish peasant from Nazareth, is coupled with my libertarian leanings and the newfound information in this book, a new ideological cocktail is being mixed in my heart and mind, intoxicating me with a greater distaste for U.S. military interventionism and “defense” tactics.
I will most likely continue to blog through this book as insight occurs to me.
P.S. A day after I finished writing this post, I picked up "Operation Dark Heart" and read the following words on page 45:
"George Patton's rule: The best defense is a good offense."
I guess my football coach stole it from Patton.
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