Caitlin Johnstone reports:
Trump Killed Those US Troops In Jordan
Those soldiers weren’t killed by Iran. They were killed by Donald Trump. They were killed by the oligarchs and empire managers whose decisions sent them to die in yet another middle eastern war based on lies, and who will never lose a wink’s sleep over it.
Everyone thinking of joining the US military should refrain from doing so, and everyone who is already in the US military should do everything they possibly can to get out. Because there is nothing worse than killing and dying for rich bastards who will never give a fuck about you.
Western democracies have been losing troops in pointless wars for decades since WW2 but still persist in conflating the individual sacrifice of human beings with a nonsense cause.
The real problem is that western democracies do not understand what an existential threat is because they have never experienced it in living memory.
The only countries that have experienced an existential threat in living memory are Russia (then in the Soviet Union) and then Germany as a result of their failed existential threat to the Soviet Union.
Hitler occupied many European countries but they were not subject to the same existential threat as Russia, only a comparatively benign occupation by comparison with the atrocities and losses in the Soviet Union.
But what about Britain and the Blitz? What about the existential threats to Israel? Japan?
Even if the Luftwaffe had overcome the RAF in 1940 there is no way that a seaborne invasion would have succeeded against, at the time, one of the world's biggest and most powerful navies even if they were up against the German U-boats. And even if Great Britain had been occupied it would have not been subject to the same existential threat as the 'untermenschen' in the Soviet Union.
Isreal has also been subject to existential threats from its neighbours. But there is no way that Israel would have been wiped off the map with the USA at their back. Otherwise it would undoubtedly have happened already.
Japan is the only country in the world whose existence was threatened by nuclear bombardment. But their subsequent US occupation was not an existential threat to Japan - it was more likely beneficial. Although that might not have been the case if Japan was occupied by China who almost certainly would have killed more Japanese than the Americans, in revenge for atrocities committed in their country, and set about erasing Japanese culture.
So what's the point?
The point is that people fighting existential wars are fighting in a different war from those fighting in wars of choice.
Their sacrifice means something and is not just a statistic in what was often an unnecessary political war.
This is one reason why western/US leaders find it hard to understand Russia and their reaction to NATO enlargement, which Russia regards as an existential threat as their leaders actually have some idea of what that means.
These western leaders are from countries whose populations have never had to face an existential war, never had to deal with a siege of Leningrad scale of civilian deaths and never had to deal with casualty figures in the tens of millions.
It is simply not part of their cultural, political and military experience so it is no wonder they do not understand it.
Russia experienced a different scale of conflict and this kind of experience does not disappear from the cultural, political and military memory easily.
If the war in Iran continues then a lot more 'heroes' are going to die and whether they are soldiers in Jordan or children at school in Iran it's hard to think of their unnecessary deaths as an act of heroism.