Under the false guise of spreading freedom, the U.S. military has created devastation and tyranny across the globe, and our country is now bringing its imperialism to Syria. Behind the facade of liberation and democracy there is a machine that is fueled by violence and death and produces profit for elites at the expense of peace and international stability. The gravest threat to humanity does not come from radical groups like ISIS but instead from the military industrial complex and elites who value profit above human life and the progress of mankind.

If the wars that America is currently fighting are efforts to spread democracy and freedom, then why is it that the United States has a strong alliance with Saudi Arabia, a country run by a brutal theocracy that imprisons and murders citizens for expressing political dissent and free speech? The answer is that Saudi Arabia supplies us with oil. According to the leaked Wolfowitz Doctrine, America’s occupation of the Middle East is part of a strategy to maintain control of oil in the region and to establish America as the dominant world superpower. Rather than fighting wars for freedom, our military intervention in the Middle East is a game of power for wealthy elites to maintain control of natural resources and establish the United States as the dominant empire.

Our recent attack on Syria, and our politicians calling for U.S. intervention to take out President Bashar al-Assad, resemble the beginning of the Iraq war. Dwight Eisenhower warned the public in his last presidential address that the military industrial complex posed a grave threat to liberty — a warning that has been confirmed by the current reality of endless warfare and the profit incentive that fuels war. The weapons and tools of war are produced by profit-motivated corporations that make a fortune from war and donate massive amounts of money to politicians who will support their agenda — companies like Lockheed Martin, whose CEO, Marillyn Hewson, made more than $25 million in 2013.

If we were engaging in war to spread freedom, then why has the CIA spent decades overthrowing democracies and replacing them with tyrannical regimes and dictatorships? This may sound like a conspiracy to people who aren’t dedicated to researching the history of human rights atrocities perpetrated by our government, but it is a proven fact. In Iran, in 1953, the CIA helped overthrow the democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh because he nationalized the country’s oil, which reduced the profits of the oil industry.

In 1954, the United States overthrew the democratically elected leader of Guatemala and replaced him with a brutal military dictatorship. In 1973, the U.S. government worked covertly attempting to destabilize the government of Chile so that a coup could take place, and when this coup happened, it resulted in the rise of brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, who murdered thousands of citizens and imprisoned hundreds of thousands for political dissent.

During the 1980s, the U.S. government infamously attempted to have the government of Nicaragua overthrown by funding and training members of the terrorist group known as the Contras. In 2011, we helped overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and his assassination has resulted in a disastrous civil war that has left millions of people devastated.

We are now seeing a continuation of this history — as our leaders voice support for using military intervention to take Assad out of power for allegedly using chemical weapons on his citizens — but I urge you to be skeptical of that claim and remember that we were lied to about weapons of mass destruction before we invaded and destabilized Iraq.

We have already trained and armed radical rebel groups in Syria that are affiliated with terrorist organizations and are fighting against Assad. The madness of funding terrorism has gotten to the point that in Syria, militias that were backed by the Pentagon engaged in battle against rival militias that were backed by the CIA. You know that your country has gone down the rabbit hole of insanity when your government is arming two rival militias with the weapons they are both using to kill each other.

For the profit of the elites, we have destabilized the world in order to conduct wars and operations that have resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent people. We now have a generation of Americans who have lived their entire lives in a country where constant warfare is considered normal. Will the people of the United States stand up to their leaders and demand an end to the senseless bloodshed, or will we continue our evolution into an Orwellian society where “war is peace?”