We lost. Again. Because we are wrong. Again.

I was asked by a dear friend, a patriotic American Muslim and lifetime activist for just causes, to write about how we might actually do some good in Afghanistan and Iraq. I find myself only able to express the horror of what we face, and how it is that is what we have caused. This is the America I stand against, not the socialists trying to rein in the robber barons and give beans and bandaids to the working poor. Though we have been there almost a decade, and will likely be there for many years to come, this is why we have lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, past tense, lost. If we had actually left Iraq when President Bush said the mission was accomplished, we might have won what we said we were there to do. Instead we occupied the country and attempted to set up (once again) one of them who would utter our orders in their language, a cacique. As in Vietnam, even having the most powerful military might on the planet, sooner or later we can only make some show of "victorious withdrawal" and slink out.

Osama Bin Laden, if he is still alive, is on his face five times every day thanking Allah for making his September 11 mission more successful than he could possibly have dreamed. His tiny mission team consisted of fewer men than a platoon of Marines. They were educated and traveled young men, most of them middle class or wealthy like Osama himself, and almost all were Saudi. None was Iraqi, and none was Afghani. Using only borrowed equipment without armament, they conducted a single mission against a country which is defended by the world’s most powerful Air Force and a warning system manned by thousands of Americans spending billions of dollars. The result of that successful mission was to motivate the hubris-driven leader of America, the provincial and ignorant privileged Sunday-school simpleton George Bush, to initiate a war against two countries his advisors had dreamed of for years, hoping to make great profits for themselves “supporting the troops.”

Acting upon that single mission, George Bush made aggressive ruthless unprovoked war on the innocent people of two nations which had nothing to do with that mission, other than sharing its planners’ religion, and harboring them where they had a right to be at the time. Osama’s tiny organization of a few fellow Saudis protesting Americas’ use of his country as a staging ground for aggression against their neighbors has now grown from twenty courageous, pious, and self-sacrificing heroes to a global network of tens of thousands, all committed to finding a way to bring us down. Nothing Bush could have done would have been better for Osama’s objective. America has bankrupted itself, squandered our military might, and smeared our reputation over the entire globe, confirming the resolve of our enemies, and making enemies of millions of people who were once our friends . That September attack may have been the single greatest tactical mission since that bold squad of footsoldiers smuggled themselves into the city of Troy in a wooden horse.

Though the capitalist warmongers of the Christian Right who made of that September mission their Reichstag Fire to motivate seizing power in America claim to be led by their ideology, it is not the ideology of statesmanship, but of wealthmanship they follow. Nor is this the first time we have done this. In Iran a few decades ago, an elected democratic government was covertly undermined by the CIA and replaced by a puppet monarch dictator who enriched himself at our trough by dealing with our corporations for his country’s oil reserves. Since the otherwise peaceful clergy of that country removed that cacique and took over the government, America’s right wing oil barons have struggled for decades to find a way to justify destroying Iran. To that objective, we elevated Saddam Hussein to dictatorial power, and financed his war against them. Likewise in Iraq and Afghanistan, the oil reserves have been the big chip which moves the capitalists of America. Though it has enriched a few corporations, that war has bankrupted America, reduced our personal freedoms enormously, created a vast Gestapo-like police state structure, and turned most of the world’s nations and people against us, or at least to distrust us, and rightly so. We American patriots have been reduced on one hand to a disappointed and mistrustful group who have seen the righteous principles we believe in violated at every turn, and on the other hand a horde of flag-waving jingoists, prideful bigoted fanatics and racists, who are ready to send all but their own image of “real Americans” to the worst hells they can conceive.

In the 1950’s, we sent our CIA into the newly-created nation of Laos, formerly five French colonies which had been forged together under Japanese occupation in the 1940’s. They had just created a modern democracy in their country, and had a working government consisting of many political parties and ethnic groups. That government was called Pathet Lao, which means Free Laos. It would seem to be exactly what we claimed we were trying to create all over the world. That was, unfortunately, a lie. We declared since they admitted a Communist Party to that broad coalition, they were a Communist country. We used our covert forces to install a former monarch from one of those colonies as the “rightful” leader of the entire new country. We armed his palace guard, called them the country’s defense force, and permitted them to drive the Pathet Lao into the jungles. Unable to legally finance that new dictatorship through our Congress, we let them take over the lucrative opium market which China had conducted peacefully there for hundreds of years. That opium trade was conducted through the “French connection” we had built dealing with the Sicilian syndicate we call the Mafia in order to control the commies in the longshoremen unions of Marseilles during World War II. The money came from the streets of our cities, where prohibition of the drug keeps the prices up, and was used to buy black-market Russian weapons…so it wouldn’t look like we were behind them. When we lost the war in Vietnam, we bombed the fields of Laos with land mines to prevent them from growing the opium...or anything else. The Pathet Lao deposed the cacique we had installed, and they control the country today.

In Afghanistan today, we send airplanes costing fifty million dollars each, which burn enough gas on each mission to supply an automobile for fifty years, to drop million dollar bombs more powerful than Tim McVeigh’s truck on a handful of ragged illiterate mountain men with rifles who are guarding fields of opium. We do this in the name of protecting Americans from that natural pain reliever, while the corporations that fund our warmongering leaders’ campaigns have addicted millions of us to patented synthetic versions of that same drug. We are killing the Afghanis to protect their market from the superior natural product. This hypocrisy has killed thousands of them, and also has killed thousands of us, truly making ghouls of those corporations’ executives, men who have grown obscenely rich gorging themselves on the death and suffering of others.

Those who take their religion seriously are also aware that the arrogant goons of our mercenary security forces, and the bigoted fanatic religious cult within our government are attempting to create Christian cabals within the new states, and are spreading their heretical form of god-man idolatry among their children with smuggled-in Bibles, and obsequious evangels promising them heaven if they will just kneel and swear to obey Jesus Christ and Pat Robertson. Not satisfied to destroy their homes, their cities’ infrastructure, their economy, their culture, and their government, we are determined to kill their God as well. In return, we offer them women’s suffrage, and the BigMac.

Whatever comes of our attempt at occupation and economic exploitation of Iraq or Afghanistan, or how many of them are able to enrich themselves taking advantage of the money we pump into their countries, no Iraqi alive will ever forget that in the name of freeing them from a single despot, we reduced their ancient and beautiful land to a rubble pile in the desert laced with deadly depleted uranium, and we have killed a million of them in the process, and we kill more of them every day. Like the children of our SWAT-patrolled inner cities, every little kid growing up in either of those countries dreams of the day he might someday be able to kill just one of those grinning armored goofs who are passing out candy one minute, and kicking down their doors and killing their fathers the next.

Today in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, after a trillion dollars and almost a decade of futile mayhem, there is not a single square meter of land where a common American citizen could safely stand, without being protected by a guard of armed men. Unless we are able to somehow suddenly change ourselves from the ravenous worm to the butterfly, I think it is not unfair to say as long as there is one man left in either of those countries who still has a free mind, a heart, a soul, and a pair of balls, there will be no such place.