Just a Question

If this Republican administration is so deeply concerned about helping the suffering Burmese people, why on earth don't they just coordinate their efforts with military powers that already have permission to enter that country on relief missions? They could give their assistance to the Thai military, for instance, and provide backup support without actively landing in Myanmar.

I gotta tell ya – if I were running a developing nation, I'd be mighty reluctant to allow the U.S. military to invade my country under any pretense of assistance. You'll never see the ass end of them if you do. That much is pretty well established.

That said, there's a fundamental problem with the language we use these days to describe our warriors and their objectives. It's been an active PR campaign designed by the Pentagon and ongoing since Vietnam. They finally tumbled to the fact that Americans are not fond of war, so they started calling it peace instead. It sells better. We simply re-named our soldiers 'peacekeepers'. There. All fixed. The only problem is that it isn't true. I can remember a time when the term "peacekeeper" was a jewel of sarcasm, delivered with a sneering belligerence. Peacekeeping is not what soldiers do. By the time the Marines land, all bets are off. They aren't there to be polite. They are there to "enforce" something. Anyone who is unclear on the meaning of that word should look it up. People with guns are not hired to 'negotiate' a peace. They are hired to enforce. Force, coercion, and threats are not designed to promote peace; they are designed to promote acquiescence, in the most efficient manner possible. There's a subtle but important distinction there.

CNN just reported that the U.S. military is the world's largest relief organization. I don't know about you, but I nearly had an aneurysm.
Clearly this all explains why the U.S. military has done such a spectacular job of rebuilding all the shit they blew up in Iraq, and how they've managed to restore and maintain all that glorious peace over there.

Forgive me, but I have to go back over the whole Katrina disaster now, and try to wrap my mind around the more glaring contradictions here. It may take a while. I'm sure they really care about all those suffering people. I'm sure they do. They must. So why didn't they invade New Orleans with relief? Could it be because they already own that particular patch of earth?

Soldiers=peacekeepers
U.S. military force=relief organization
Suffering of poor people=U.S. military "assistance"

My radar's beeping so loud I can't hear myself think.