To the editor:
The shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., has left one of them dead and the other critically injured as of this writing. The apparent shooter worked for the CIA in Afghanistan. He was allowed entry into this country by the Biden administration and granted asylum by the Trump administration. This is the kind of bipartisanship that brought us the forever wars.
This is only the latest in a long string of incidents of unintended consequences following the stupendous misuse and abuse of the U.S. military by politicians and well-placed private entities who couldn't resist the huge profits to be had by the few, while the many were subjected to danger, destruction and death. They managed to scare a gullible public into believing that behind every tree and under every manhole cover lurked a wild-eyed terrorist. It worked and was a tragedy for many, but very profitable for a select few.
My reference to an apparent shooter is likely to bring a number of keyboard patriots out of their chairs, enraged by any suggestion that this suspect with the hard-to-pronounce name should be granted the protections of due process.
Meanwhile, the lessons of our 20 years of glory seeking in Iraq and Afghanistan are being ignored by a government that is attempting to distract from its failures in order to pursue -- what else -- profit for a select few. They do this when they invade our own cities and, once again, put ordinary citizens and ordinary soldiers in harms way. And because they never stop fighting as long as the dying is done by others, they seem poised to send even more troops to Venezuela, which sits on a huge amount of oil reserves. All the while, the Congress raises not a whimper of protest.
The shooting in D.C. and the killings off the coast of Venezuela serve to widen the immigration divide that has set Americans against each other in a way that helps our rulers to carry out the dismantling of our democracy and trashes America's reputation across the world.
John Rucki
Amsterdam