berniesrevolution:

“The United States has now been at war for almost two decades. Initiated in Afghanistan in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and extending to Iraq and the greater Middle East, the war, sometimes framed as a single “global war on terror” and sometimes as a series of discrete military campaigns, has left hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands more maimed, displaced, diseased, and traumatized. Marred by military atrocities, torture scandals, fiscal waste, toxic exposure, popular opposition, and public disgust, the U.S. invasion of Iraq induced a regional death spiral and inspired new terrorist networks of the kind that the war was ostensibly fought to vanquish. Even as the active U.S. military presence has decreased, there have been repeated calls to return to large-scale U.S. combat forces to the region and renewed panic about “Islamic” terrorist infiltration of the U.S. “homeland.” The longest U.S. war to date, this conflict has taken on an aura of permanence that is extraordinary by any measure.”

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Race And America’s Long War, by Nikhil Pal Singh