Dear Jacinda – so what does ‘victory’ in Iraq & Afghanistan look like then?

Sigh…

Jacinda Ardern’s U-turn on pulling troops out of Iraq
The Labour-led Government is extending New Zealand’s deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan despite promising in Opposition to pull troops out.

…at a time when there are serious question marks over possible war crimes committed by our Defence personnel in Afghanistan, Jacinda has decided to renege on a promise to pull out of these pointless occupations to suck up to America.

We have GCSB and SIS agents working alongside the NZDF intelligence units in Iraq and   Afghanistan, these units were actively used by the CIA and US Army to help target drone strikes.

We have serious allegations of war crimes from Hit and Run and the Stuff investigation, ‘The Valley’ and we hand over prisoners to known torture units in direct contradiction of the Geneva Convention.

We have a military who lie, manipulate and deceive the NZ population at all times about what we are really doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and we now have a Prime Minister who is complicit in all of this by continuing our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to prop up corrupt regimes.

The greatest and most disgusting part of this lie is that the so called engineers and trainers in Iraq are ‘protected’ by the SAS, this is just a cover to have the SAS there so that they can conduct off the record missions.

So what does ‘victory’ look like in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Without being able to answer that very simple question, without explaining to the taxpayers who are funding this madness, we are participating in state violence without end and when we consider the obscene cost of this fiasco at $63million just for two years in Iraq, (total costs now exceed $100’s of millions), it is unacceptable in the extreme to justify blowing over $100million on this prolonged war crime when 45 000 New Zealanders are homeless and hundreds of thousands of our own children live in poverty.

When our Defence force has finished committing war crimes could they possibly find those WMDs in Iraq (which was the original reason we invaded) and catch those who committed the 9/11 terror attacks in Afghanistan (which was the original reason we invaded there).

This can not stand. We are a better people than Jacinda’s decision suggests.