🇺🇸🕊️ War Is a Racket: From Iraq and Afghanistan to the Next Trillion-Dollar Bloodletting

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious."
— Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC (1935)

📜 The Brutal Repetition of a "Mistake"

In 2008, President Barack Obama publicly admitted that the Iraq War was a mistake.

A mistake?

A sovereign nation destroyed on false intelligence.
Over 500,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. And on the morning of Eid al-Adha — a sacred day for Muslims — President Saddam Hussein was hanged after a show trial, turning a holy celebration into a spectacle of humiliation and vengeance.
Entire generations displaced, traumatized, and erased.

“A racket is best described... as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about.”
— Smedley Butler

The U.S. war machine rolled on.

🔥 Afghanistan: The Longest Lie

For 20 years, Americans were told that the war in Afghanistan was necessary, noble, and just.
But what did it truly achieve?

Nearly 2,500 U.S. soldiers dead
20,000+ wounded
Over 46,000 Afghan civilians killed
Millions displaced

And in the end?

A final flight at dusk.
A U.S. military helicopter lifts off from the rooftop of the Kabul embassy.
Below, dust swirls.
Desperate Afghan families cling to fences.
A lone American soldier looks back at a war that cost everything and changed nothing.
The sun sets—not just on a mission, but on the myth of victory.

“I spent thirty-three years... being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.”
— Smedley Butler

💵 The Cost: Trillions, Not Mistakes

Iraq War

$1.9 trillion (including future veterans’ care)
Over 4,500 U.S. service members killed
Civilian deaths: ~200,000

Afghanistan War

$2.3 trillion+
2,461 U.S. service members killed
Civilian deaths: ~46,000–100,000+

Total: Over $6–8 trillion — for what?
Not security. Not peace. Not democracy.

“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914... made Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues...”
— Smedley Butler

💔 Veterans: The Forgotten Price

300,000+ Iraq/Afghanistan veterans with PTSD
320,000+ with traumatic brain injuries
30,177+ suicides since 2001 — more than 4× combat deaths
*22+ veterans die by suicide every single day

"Our boys were sent to war to die for the benefit of the very few. That’s war. A racket.”
— Smedley Butler

🔁 The Same Machine Eyes Iran

Today, the very same unelected war architects beat the drums for Iran.

No accountability for Iraq.
No reckoning for Afghanistan.
No trials for war crimes.
No hearings for truth.
No justice for veterans or the dead.

Just silence. And silence is not neutrality.
It is complicity.

🛑 ENOUGH.

You paid for Iraq.
You paid for Afghanistan.
In taxes. In trauma. In blood.
Don’t pay for another.

"There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights... War for any other reason is simply a racket."
— Smedley Butler

💥 Let These Be the Questions:

Who profits from these wars?
Who dies for them?
Who is never held accountable?
Why are we still silent?

✊ Demand:

✅ A congressional reckoning for Iraq & Afghanistan
✅ Full transparency on military-industrial lobbying
✅ Lifelong, prioritized veterans care
✅ No war on Iran without public consent and moral clarity

📚 SOURCES:

Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935) – Read Full Text
Costs of War Project, Brown University – www.costsofwar.org
RAND Corporation: PTSD & TBI data – www.rand.org
U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs – Veteran Suicide Data
BBC, NYT, Reuters, Al Jazeera – Verified civilian death and withdrawal reports

🕯️ Silence is complicity.
Let history never say we didn’t know.

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