Don't Ask Me, I Don’t Give a Damn

Don't ask me, I don’t give a damn 

It’s one, two, three what are we fighting for, don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.

Those were the protest lyrics of the Country Joe and The Fish 1965 song I’m Fixen to Die, a theme tune of the anti war revolution. Long haired, toked-up baby boomers yelled FUCK, called the FISH cheer, before they sang along to the song with lead singer, Joe MacDonald, as seen in the 1969 Woodstock festival. 

Substitute the word Vietnam for ‘next stop is I..ran’, and like good poetry, I’m Fixen to Die is as relevant today as it was as an anthem against the War sixty years ago. 

Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in that war, dubbed a conflict. Hundreds of thousands more came home with crippling physical and mental disabilities. Over one million Vietnamese, north and south, lost their lives.

The supposed reason for it all was to stop communism and honor the Southeast Asian Treaty, (SETO).

In June of 2025, fifty years after the last presence of the U.S. left Vietnam, Israel bombed Iran. The U.S. followed with the bombing weeks later. The supposed reason: to deter Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal. Currently there are 40,000 US troops stationed in the Middle East readying for warfare.

For over thirty years Bibi Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, claimed Iran had nuclear weapons. “They are three to five years away from building a nuclear bomb,” he has harangued.

Both June bombings occurred while Gaza, that piece of earth called Palestine, was being leveled by Israel in a retaliation for an attack on that country by the terrorist group Hamas two years earlier, October 7, 2023.  

Twelve hundred Israeli lives were lost in that initial attack by Hamas. To date, 67,000 Palestinians have died, many children, deaths from US and European made munitions. “Five Gaza lives for every Israeli death,” was the cry from Tel Aviv. 

A peace treaty was tried, but broken.

While Country Joe’s lyrics, what are we fighting for were prophetic they are cogitatio ingrata, (unwelcomed thinking) in warfare circles.   

Since 1975, the US has engaged in 15 battles, conflicts, wars, including The Gulf War in the early 1990s, the Weapons of Mass Destruction War following 9/11, (some analysts believe a contrivance of Israeli intelligence), and until recently, the US ongoing presence in Afghanistan. 

Rossouw Malan, a South African writer, says in the blog Medium that nations go to war due to a Trifecta of fear, honor and a nation's interests. 

Fear concerns a sense of danger from another. Honor concerns national identity. A nation’s Interests concerns economic and strategic needs.

CarLyn Beccia, also writing in the Medium, quoted a researcher, Richard Lebown who did an analysis of 94 wars. Warfare, he said, isn't primarily  related to a country’s need for resources or land. But it comes down to status, security and revenge. Only 7 percent of the 94 wars studied had a nation’s resources as a reason for war.

“It’s the red flag of the ego,” Beccia says. Revenge prompts war and relates to the ego of a nation.

There has been an extensive body of work written about revenge and war. Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, wrote about revenge and war dating back to 1825. At the end of WWI, an analysis of revenge was done for the Treaty of Versailles. George Orville wrote about it in a 1945 essay entitled Revenge is Sour. 

Whether it’s revenge, or the Trifecta as reasons for US foreign engagements, this country has long been the pay daddy for Israel’s war wishes. 

According to a Council of Foreign Relations web page, the US has given 300 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) in economic and military aid to Israel since its creation, May of 1948, mostly for the seven wars with its Arab neighbors. Those monies were not loans, but were made as grants which didn’t require pay-back. More money has  gone to Israel than any other country. Thirty eight billion has recently been budgeted for military and economic aid to Israel for the next 10 years. 

This aid could go toward the little examined Imperial policy, The Greater Israel Project which seeks to expand the current borders of that country into neighboring areas. Threatening this plan is Iran and its capacity to establish itself as one of the nuclear weapon-holding countries of the world, which Israel is.

The US foreign entanglements have been prompted by a dark force. A dark force which is rigid, paranoid, governed by a victim-based belief system of Biblical prophecy. A force unable to sustain its mission without the backing of sinister forces existing within the US, also rigid and retributive.    

Americans have proven they will fight, whether with a military of draftees or volunteers. But let it be for a US vendetta, or American strategic interests, not for some other ethno-state who suckers us into their conflict. Time will tell if this decade's Vietnam will become I…ran.