Never-Ending Story 1
Mother Jones reprints (reposts?) William Astore’s “7 Reasons America Is Stuck in Never-Ending War.” Here’s one, the seventh; follow the link for the rest.
What’s truly “exceptional” in twenty-first-century America is any articulated vision of what a land at peace with itself and other nations might be like. Instead, war, backed by a diet of fear, is the backdrop against which the young have grown to adulthood. It’s the background noise of their world, so much a part of their lives that they hardly recognize it for what it is. And that’s the most insidious danger of them all.
March 21, 2015 at 3:51 pm
I spent the greater part of the last 15 years writing about “threat inflation,” sometimes famously, as you know. I have to say, looking back, it didn’t change a thing. Which is why I’m tired of doing it. All the bad people, the worst tendencies, won. And won big. At the beginning of the war on terror I had an acquaintance who worked for the mentioned DynCorp. He was tasked, along with others, with coming up with an analysis of what would be needed to detect the release of biological weapons and what the current state of the art in sensors was, the idea being that DynCorp would invest in research and implementation and be paid for by the taxpayer. He asked me to look at it. I did it. It was all make-believe, unscientific rubbish, which I told him. He said, obviously, that his supervisor disagreed. Naturally, I expected it. What the analysis was supposed to be was a sales pitch, not an assessment of any kind.
The other matter still worth addressing is that the DoD has become adept at waging less-than-total war. Total war, one which involved the general US populace, would be unacceptable, so it won’t get involved in fighting countries that can mount an immediate and active counter to it, even if weaker. That is, which is perfectly obvious, why we only bomb paupers and weaklings. We can shatter the infrastructure in these little countries with a variety of interventions with the result being they’re turned into variations on Somalia. There will be no victory over ISIS because Iraq is now just a failed state run by militias and tribes and you can’t be these because that entails killing everyone; there will always be something like ISIS there. Same with Syria. Same with Libya. Same with Yemen. Maybe we’ll even go too far in the Ukraine, raising the potential the US military could actually get into a fight with a foreign force that could, and would be itching to, lay a glove on it.
It’s difficult to work up any belief in the critical thinking abilities of those calling the shots in national security. They just run it as a money and resource-burning global operation. And it matters in the slightest that no wars are actually won with entire regions, reduced to states of permanent human misery.
The only thing that is required of Americans is that they finance it, agree with it, and do the obsequiousness thing masqueraded as thanks-for-all-the-troops-do on a regular basis. It’s a good national brainwash. If it wasn’t DoD and its national corporate infrastructure would have lost all its legitimacy a long time ago.