All across the United States yesterday (the nation's militaristic Memorial Day), untold masses of "[United States of] Americans" from our aggressively imperialist president on down repeated the doctrinal mantras that (i) "we are a nation of war" and (ii) we are indebted to "our" military for its "defense" of the (revealing word) "homeland."

Both of these statements are thoroughly false.

1. We are NOT a "nation at war." Where's the war? Ordinary U.S. citizens do not dodge IEDs and bombs and bullets and missiles and drone attacks and RPGs and Blackhawk and Apache Helicopters and face armed check points and artillery shells and the threat of rendition and torture and aerial assaults on the way to and from our homes, workplaces, schools, recreational facilities, and shopping malls etc. It is truly an insult to people living in actually war-torn nations (ie. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently Sri Lanka) to say that U.S. citizens are enduring life under war" conidtions. 

What "we are" is the populace of a nation ruled by an aggressively imperialist foreign policy establishment that took a predictable counter-assault on American Empire as a welcome pretext to launch two criminal/petro-colonial wars of imperial invasion on: (a) Afghanistan (October 2001 to the present); (b) Iraq (March 2003 to the present).. The counter-assault was 9/11, a spectaclular form of imperial 'blowback." ( to use a common CIA term to describe what happens when you over-provoke people abroad)  for U.S. Middle East policy (including U.S.-lef economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqis).  The second imperial invasion has killed more than 1.3 million Iraqis to date.  I don't know how many tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths the first imperial invasion has generated.  I do know that:

* Emperor Obama's bombers recently killed more than ten dozen Afghan civilians (most under 18 years old) in western Afghanistan. His armed forces actually tried to blame this mass murder from the sky on Taliban grenades 

* Obama (who is particularly attached to the "nation at war" mantra) has significantly expanded the degree and territorial reach of U.S. imperial violence in South Asia;

* Obama has recently put a notorious death squad leader with a bloody record of mass butchery in Iraq (Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal) in charge of the new U.S. "Af-Pak" campaign --- a clear statement of his decision to double down and go for arch-militarist broke in South Asia in the same of the same supposed "global war on terror" that George W. Bush launched.

2.  "Defense?" The U.S. Bush-Obama "defense" budget (more than $1 trillion per year) accounts for nearly half the military spending on Earth and supports (among other things) more than 760 U.S. military bases located across more than 130 "sovereign" countries. "Our" openly imperial presence and related bloody methods are widely and deeply resented around the world, endangering our security at home and abroad.  "Our" vastly expensive empire (itself a giant public subsidy for high-tech firms like Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and General Electric etc.) involves massive military expenditures that dwarf reasonable requirements of national self-defense and put the "homeland" at risk by provoking "blowback" that can be quite deadly in an age of hyper-mobile high-tech destructive power. I personally thought the "homeland" got off easy with 9/11; I was expecting something much bigger.  I'm still expecting that in light of the millions of Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners, and Southwest Asians "we" have viciously, unapologetically, and self-righteously (in the laughable name of supposed noble "freedom"- and "democracy"-promotion and Christ-like U.S. 'sacrifice")butchered, displaced, humiliated, tortured, and illegally invaded and occupied in recent decades.

Among other things, Obama's behavior in office exposes the childish futility of hoping that Superpower's assault on oil-rich South/Southwest Asia will be scaled back by the United States' supposed "democratic" elections system.