War and Rumors of War 2
Dan Simpson hears the grumblings about yet another war and hopes that we learn from the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq. He lists those who monger for war. A nugget:
The second is that the Department of Defense, like the rest of the government, is facing budget cuts, due in part to sequestration but also because Americans will want their peace dividend now that the Iraq War is over and the Afghanistan War soon will be.
The third is that the world is always full of what the American military-industrial complex, first identified as a danger by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, can portray as lively candidates for U.S. military intervention.
The Iraq War was a success for no one other than Mr. Bush, who was reelected as a war president in 2004. It is hard to imagine that he would have been reelected without the war. America lost more than 4,000 citizens in Iraq and many thousands more were disabled. An estimated 110,000 Iraqis died. The financial costs are estimated at up to $2 trillion.
He hopes we have learned something.
I fear we have not.
March 24, 2013 at 6:10 pm
Good piece, especially the bit about Mali, which parties have been lobbying for war in for over a year. I was consulted over the weekend for a Daily Mail piece on the alleged use of a chemical weapon in Syria. I was given the details and they were thin. Not at all what the noise is aiming at, which is that Syria might be using chemical weapons. At best, it’s this. A small ‘al qaeda-associated’ faction fired a homemade rocket at a Syrian military checkpoint. The rocket was loaded with a small amount of liquid chlorine from a local facility that makes the stuff for water sanitation. Some civilians died along with a few Syrian soldiers, unclear whether it was the impact and explosion of the improvised rocket or chlorine exposure. The amount of chlorine was fairly trivial which is why it doesn’t violate the chemical weapons convention. It’s a homemade thing, essentially more like assaulting someone with a caustic agent, like acid throwing. This was tried by insurgents in Iraq years ago to not much effect.
However, you can see where the usual types will want to take this. First, they’ll try to pin it on the Syrian government. Then when that doesn’t work they’ll start in about al Qaeda again.
March 24, 2013 at 10:38 pm
Thanks.
I try to promote stuff that is interesting and offers a perspective that isn’t getting enough play, as well as stuff that plays to my particular hobby-horses, such as gun nut paradise, or is just plain weird. Most of my posts are written to promote stuff that I think is worth a reading or a hearing or might cause a chuckle or a gasp or a smile.
Rarely any more do I do long posts about what I think, because I’ve already done them, they are in the archives, over there, in the sidebar, to the right, where all good sidebars belong.
I thought that Mr. Simpson cut through the crap in a most effective manner. I also expect that you will not see his column in wide syndication precisely because of that.
There’s lots of bad stuff everywhere. We can’t wage enough wars to make it go away.
Perhaps waging a little peace might make a difference.