By Rob C.
Art by Drew Sheneman
TL;DR: Memorial Day is not about bumper stickers, flag-themed beer koozies, or politicians pretending they care about troops they routinely send into unnecessary wars, it’s meant to be a solemn day of remembrance for the American soldiers who laid down their lives in service to this nation, but it has been thoroughly sanitized into a weekend of backyard barbecues and cheap political platitudes.
It’s about Americans who died because leaders lied, manipulated, exaggerated, or manufactured reasons for war.
We do not honor the fallen by pretending every conflict they died in was a noble crusade for freedom; we honor them by telling the truth about the monstrous lies that sent them there. The soldiers didn’t choose Vietnam, Iraq, or whatever fresh hell Trump and Netanyahu are up to with Iran. Politicians did.
The heartbreaking reality of America is that while our troops faithfully followed orders, a bipartisan succession of chicken-hawk politicians lied to send them into slaughterhouses of imperial adventurism. If we truly want to honor the fallen, we need to stop letting corrupt leaders create more of them.
Good morning to everyone except the Washington politicians currently drafting their annual, ghostwritten tweets about the “ultimate sacrifice” while simultaneously voting to slash veterans’ healthcare and greenlight the next war. If you are looking for comfortable, flag-waving platitudes today, you have wandered onto the wrong corner of the internet. Memorial Day is not a celebration of the American military-industrial complex, nor is it a marketing opportunity for mattress sales. It is a day of profound, devastating grief meant to honor the men and women who returned to American soil in flag-draped coffins.
And if we are going to honor them honestly, then we need to tell the truth about who sent them to die and why.
Since World War II, the United States has launched hundreds of military interventions across the globe. Depending on how they are counted, we’ve conducted roughly 469 military interventions since 1798, while Congress has fulfilled its constitutional duty and actually declared war exactly five times. Five.
We have essentially normalized permanent war. America has been involved in military conflict for 229 out of its 249 years of existence. At this point, peace is treated like a weird commercial break between invasions.
But we dishonor every single one of those dead soldiers when we treat their deaths as unavoidable acts of God rather than what they actually were: the direct, calculated results of political decisions made by comfortable men in air-conditioned rooms.
The brave men and women who died in those operations did not choose to cross oceans to engage in geopolitical chess. They didn’t choose the terrain, they didn’t choose the target, and they certainly didn’t choose the corporate-sponsored rationale.
The troops carried rifles. The politicians carried talking points.
One group paid the price. The other got book deals.
The Original Betrayal: Vietnam
Americans are taught to think of Vietnam as some tragic but noble mistake. A misunderstanding. A Cold War miscalculation. History got messy, things happened, moving on.
But the truth is uglier than that.
To understand how deeply entrenched the architecture of the political lie truly is, we have to look back at the generational trauma of the Vietnam War. The great myth we have fed the American public for fifty years is that our intervention in Southeast Asia was a noble, tragic necessity to stop the global spread of the red menace. But history holds the receipts, and they paint a terrifying picture of political arrogance. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh explicitly modeled Vietnam’s declaration of independence on our own, opening with the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson: “All men are created equal.” During World War II, Ho Chi Minh’s forces worked directly with the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the precursor to the CIA—to rescue downed U.S. pilots and fight the Japanese occupation.
Following the war, Ho Chi Minh wrote a series of desperate, urgent letters to American presidents, practically begging the United States for diplomatic support against the brutal re-imposition of French colonialism. He wanted to be our ally. Instead, the American political establishment decided to punish Vietnam for wanting its independence, backing the French empire before launching a war of unthinkable, industrialized violence of our own. Over 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands came home traumatized, wounded, addicted, abandoned, or psychologically shattered. Millions of Vietnamese civilians died in what historians have accurately described as violence on an unthinkable scale. For what? To keep Vietnam French? To stop an ideology? Ho Chi Minh died in 1969, and Vietnam won the war in 1975, reunifying their country anyway. Every single one of those 58,000 Americans died for absolutely nothing but the fragile egos of Washington politicians who refused to admit they were wrong.
And what did we get?
Did we stop communism? Vietnam is now one of America’s major trading partners.
Preserve democracy? South Vietnam was corrupt and authoritarian.
Contain China? China invaded Vietnam after the war anyway.
Everything the war supposedly prevented happened anyway.
The soldiers who died in the mud of the Mekong Delta didn’t lie us into that swamp. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara did. President Lyndon B. Johnson did. The Pentagon did.
The troops followed orders. The politicians manufactured the nightmare.
Iraq: Lies Written in American Blood
Then came Iraq — perhaps the most spectacular fraud operation ever marketed as foreign policy.
After 9/11, the Bush administration exploited national grief and fear to launch a war against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks.
If Vietnam was a tragedy of ideological blindness, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a premeditated corporate stick-up written in American blood. In the lead-up to that catastrophic invasion, a nonpartisan study later confirmed that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell made a staggering 532 explicitly false statements to the public about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction and harboring operational ties to Al Qaeda. In August of 2002, Dick Cheney confidently stood before a VFW convention and declared there was “no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” despite intelligence agencies expressing uncertainty and disagreement internally.
Then came the performance that cemented the betrayal. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations, holding up a prop vial of fake anthrax and systematically lying to the world to justify a war of aggression. It was theater. Deadly theater. Years later, Powell would confess to an interviewer, “I was mortified. It’s a blot on my record.” That “blot” on his record cost the lives of more than 4,500 American service members, left tens of thousands permanently mutilated, and resulted in the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Entire cities were destroyed. Regional instability exploded. ISIS emerged from the chaos like a nightmare born from American hubris and Halliburton invoices. No WMDs were ever found. They knew the intelligence was a fabrication, but they lied anyway because a network of over twenty influential neoconservatives embedded in the Bush administration viewed the post-9/11 chaos as a golden opportunity to launch an “Imperial America”—their exact words, not mine—to forcibly reshape critical areas of the world for Western oil and corporate profit. The troops who died in Fallujah and Ramadi didn’t invent the phantom aluminum tubes or the fictional mobile bioweapons labs. They executed the orders, while Dick Cheney’s Halliburton stock portfolio skyrocketed.
And who paid for their fantasy project?
Kids from Ohio. Texas. Michigan. California. Alabama. Kids who enlisted for college money, healthcare, patriotism, or because they genuinely believed they were defending America.
The troops who died in Iraq did not fabricate WMD intelligence. Our leaders did.
Palestine: The Proxy Meat-Grinder
Now we arrive at the modern horror show.
The grim reality of this imperial adventurism hasn’t vanished into the history books; it is currently humming along in real-time as a proxy war funded directly by your tax dollars. Since October 7, 2023, the United States has quietly funneled a mind-boggling $21.7 billion in military assistance to Israel—an amount that represents nearly three times our normal annual aid package. Israel’s entire frontline aerial combat fleet is 100% supplied by the United States, meaning every single F-15, F-16, F-35, and Apache helicopter dropping payloads on civilian infrastructure carries an American barcode.
More than 60,000 Palestinians are now dead, and international human rights experts have explicitly classified the onslaught as an ongoing genocide. We are not merely supporting a strategic ally in the Middle East; we are actively financing and enabling a industrial-scale slaughter. While American ground troops are not the ones dying in the rubble of Gaza yet, our national morality is being thoroughly executed, and our weapons are doing the killing. As a devastating human rights report recently concluded, “Israel could not have wreaked this unprecedented destruction without U.S. financing, weapons, and total political support.” We are creating an entirely new generation of global blowback, ensuring that tomorrow’s teenagers will grow up with a justified hatred of the American flag, paving the way for the next inevitable conflict.
And America keeps signing the checks.
And once again, politicians treat human beings like pieces on a geopolitical chessboard while defense contractors celebrate another profitable quarter.
Iran: Here We Go Again
And right on cue, the kleptocracy has found its next sandbox. On February 28, 2026, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu bypassed international law and launched “major combat operations” against Iran, plunging the world into a massive regional war. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is the continuation of a toxic timeline that began 73 years ago when the CIA orchestrated the infamous 1953 coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, simply because he wanted to nationalize Iranian oil.
Now, Trump has explicitly called for total regime change, bizarrely telling the Iranian people via social media to “take over your government” while American bombs rain down on their infrastructure. This war represents the culmination of Netanyahu’s career-long ambition, having finally convinced an easily manipulated, ego-driven Trump that it was a “now or never” moment for their mutual political survival. Today, crude oil is sitting at a punishing $109 a barrel, global financial markets are violently jolted, and inflation is hammering everyday Americans. The historical pattern remains unbroken: American intervention breeds massive instability, which births radical extremism, which the state then uses to justify even more military intervention. We have seen this horrific movie before, and it always ends exactly the same way: with working-class families standing over flag-draped coffins.
History really does repeat itself — first as tragedy, then as a FOX News segment sponsored by Raytheon.
The Endless Warfare State
The sheer volume of this global aggression is laid bare by the raw data. Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the United States has engaged in over 300 military interventions across the globe. A staggering 80% of all global conflicts recorded since 1945 have involved the United States military.
The so-called War on Terror alone has cost an estimated $8 trillion across operations spanning more than 85 countries. More than the Marshall Plan. More than Apollo. More than the New Deal.
And what did we buy with it?
Instead of building high-speed rail, repairing our crumbling bridges, or funding universal healthcare for our citizens, we have built an endless loop where each corporate-sponsored war purposefully creates the material conditions for the next one.
Look at Korea, it was supposed to be a temporary “police action.” Seventy-three years later, nearly 30,000 American troops are still stationed on that peninsula.
Look at Afghanistan; a conflict that politicians swore was “about hunting Al-Qaeda” rapidly devolved into a corrupt, twenty-year nation-building exercise, that enriched private defense contractors, before collapsing back into Taliban control.
Iraq destabilized an entire region. Libya collapsed into chaos. Syria became a proxy war slaughterhouse.
Every intervention creates the conditions for the next one.
War has become America’s most expensive addiction.
The Truth That Honors the Dead
The men and women we honor today did not volunteer to be the enforcement arm of multinational oil syndicates or defense conglomerates. They raised their right hands, looked at the horizon, and swore a sacred oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. They held up their end of the bargain with flawless, heartbreaking fidelity. It was the politicians who broke that oath by systematically lying them into graves.
During Vietnam, McNamara and LBJ lied, and 58,000 Americans paid the ultimate price. During Iraq, Bush and Cheney lied, and over 4,500 Americans paid with their lives.
And now new wars are being marketed to the public with the same recycled fear, propaganda, and manufactured urgency we’ve heard for generations.
Every Memorial Day, hypocritical politicians stand behind flags and talk about sacrifice. Then many of those same politicians vote for more military escalation, more interventions, more weapons contracts, and more wars they will never personally fight.
Because the people who start wars are almost never the ones buried afterward.
If we truly want to honor the fallen, we need to stop manufacturing more of them.
That is not anti-American. It is the most pro-American thing imaginable.
The lie that dishonors the dead is pretending every war was noble.
The truth that honors them is demanding fewer lies, fewer wars, and fewer grieving families standing beside military graves.
They didn’t choose this.
Our corrupt politicians did.
Read the list of major interventions below -
F*CK ICE. RELEASE ALL THE FILES!
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Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale: How Corporate Greed Is Corrupting Democracy and Endangering the Planet. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and booksellers everywhere.
The War List -
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST (Selected Major Actions):
1947-1949: Greek civil war intervention 1947-1970: Meddling in Italy’s elections, anti-communism activities 1945-1949: Intervening in China’s civil war, establishing Taiwan 1948: Supporting anti-government forces in Costa Rica 1949-1953: Anti-communism activities in Albania 1949: CIA’s first coup - Syria 1950-1953: Korean War (73 years later, 28,500 U.S. troops still remain) 1952: Egyptian Revolution intervention 1953: Orchestrated coup in Iran, overthrew democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh 1954: Invaded Guatemala, installed puppet government 1956-1957: Plotting coup in Syria 1957-1959: Supporting coup in Indonesia 1958: Creating crisis in Lebanon 1960-1961: Supporting coup in Congo 1960: Meddling in Laos reforms 1961: Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba 1961-1975: Supporting civil war and OPIUM TRADE in Laos (”Air America”) 1961-1964: Supporting anti-government activities in Brazil 1963: Supporting civil strife in Iraq 1963: Supporting riots in Ecuador 1963-1975: Vietnam War 1964: Intervening in Congo’s rebellion (and bombing) 1965-1966: Intervening in Dominican Republic civil war 1965-1967: Installing, arming, aiding fascist Indonesian military government’s massacre of communists (2-3 million killed) 1966: Engineering insurgency in Ghana 1982-1984: Lebanon intervention 1983: Grenada invasion 1989-1990: Panama invasion 1992-1995: Bosnian War intervention 1992-1994: Somalia intervention 1994-1995: Sending troops to Haiti 1996: Supporting coup in Iraq 1997: Sending troops to Albania 1997: Sending troops to Sierra Leone 1998-1999: Kosovo intervention 2001-2021: Afghanistan War (20-year nation-building exercise) 2003-2011: Iraq War 2011: Libya bombing (turned functioning state into failed state, gateway for migration, haven for extremist groups) 2023-Present: Military operations in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan (ongoing drone operations) 2026-Present: Iran War (ongoing)
War on Terror Operations: Expanded to 85+ countries with no defined endpoint