

This is exactly it. For Westerners just feeling the weight of the military-industrial complex, this feels unbelievable. The reality is, we were ignorant. Maybe we knew that Bush invaded Iraq, and had seen the pictures of Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen, but seeing those events could never match the daily toll of knowing you’re being targeted every single day. The few times that these crises bled onto US soil (Kent State, killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, police brutality at BLM protests, Jan 6th insurrection) it felt like an unbelievable atrocity, but this was what the anti-war movement was trying to highlight.
I thought I understood what was being said because I knew the facts. Trump’s reelection showed me how wrong I was.

Also the USA has nukes. No one’s going to invade us, because doing so would be a destructive act, and the final order of any armed state is to nuke its attackers. This is the same reason North Korea gets to remain its defiant self when their army could be obliterated in a few bombing runs. This isn’t even counting all the non-nuclear weaponry we have. Think of that annual budget of hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending that keeps getting raised every year…