The State Department’s key talking point on the ISIS war today is that everything is going swimmingly. Secretary of State John Kerry declared ISIS’s momentum ‘decisively halted” while other officials bragged of 6,000 ISIS fighters, and half of the ISIS leadership, killed in their air war.
The State Department was claiming the death toll was based on a private tally kept by Centcom, though Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel expressed serious doubt about the figure.
“We do know that thousands of ISIS fighters have been killed, and we do know that some of ISIS’s leadership have been killed,” Hagel said, saying he hadn’t seen any verification of exact numbers on either.
Hagel also insisted that numbers of people killed was not “the measurement” by which the war should be judged, noting that in the Vietnam War there were big body counts every day.
If the past is any guide 6000 civilians have been killed.
"…in the Vietnam War there were big body counts every day."
And most of those numbers were fictional also.
"The check's in the mail."
"Light at the end of the tunnel."
Gulf of Tonkin.
Incubator babies.
Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.
"They hate us for our freedoms."
"We don't spy on Americans."
"We have stopped 54 terrorist attacks."
Lies. All of them. And this is the shortest of short lists. They lie all the time. Comprehensively. Whenever their lips move.
And the patriotically trusting, the gullible, and the newly hatched believe them. Between "Some of the people all of the time…" and PT Barnum"s "There's a sucker born every minute" getting the political criminals under control has so far remained out of reach.
Every one of them needs to be in the dock where an adversarial process can expose their lies and speed them on their way to jail.
If only the UN's only sole power was to indict, arrest, and judge politicians as war criminals how different would our world be. jus dreamin'.
It remains impossible for the world's governments and financiers to achieve real peace. There it is: the empirical vindication of the one religious belief that is ignored by believers but entirely true: congenital, original SIN.