Endless War category archive

Stu Bykofsky note the U-turn in America’s war fever and wonders why. He considers both the beheadings in the Middle East and the Ray Rice case.

In each case, none of the facts had changed, just our perception and reaction to them.

(snip)

Founding military strategist Sun Tzu, the William Shakespeare of tactics, wrote that a crucial preliminary to battle is attacking the mind of the enemy. He proposed using spies to plant false information to create fear and confuse the enemy.

In today’s world, social media are those agents.

Do please read the rest. It’s worth thinking about.

Shaun Mullen shares 15 thoughts. Here are two of them:

(2.) The war will be unlike any other. Comparisons to World War II, let alone the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, do not begin to describe a conflict based on Whack-a-Mole air strikes backed by the marginally competent ground forces of Iraq, Kurdistan and Syria.
(3.) The air war in Libya didn’t work. Why should this one?

Read the rest.

Skillful PR does not a threat make.

This has been a complimentary edition of what Noz said.

I take anything associated with Glenn Greenwald with a grain of salt. Though I sympathize with many of his leanings, I find that his tendency to promote himself often renders his “reportage” less than objective.

Nevertheless, even though this came from his website (no link–it’s mentioned in the video and you can find it yourself), I thought it worth a look.

Zandar channels Bob Cesca on Rand Paul’s flippity-flops on ISIS. A nugget:

It’s also a deeply silly position to all of a sudden start pushing Iran as the solution to the Islamic State problem when Republicans screamed bloody murder at even using diplomacy with Iran in regards to enriching uranium. Now all of a sudden Republicans want to trust Iran’s military to bail us out so that we don’t have to send in ground troops? That’s the big plan?

Who does he think he’s fooling with this? Republican primary voters who will flay him leading up to 2016? General election voters who will laugh him out of the room? He knows he’s in trouble . . . .

Below the fold in case it autoplays.

Excerpt:

No strategy was our strategy the last time we started a war.

Also, there’s a short commercial, but it’s worth it.

Read more »

Pap discusses how the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq led to today in Iraq.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Dan Simpson advances a number of reasons why he considers military “intervention” against ISIS to be an extremely bad idea. The entire column is worth a look; here’s a snippet on the domestic pro-another-war bunch:

The Pentagon . . . needs another war to justify its budget. Taking on the Islamic State does check that box, ill-advised though it might be. It is better than fighting Russia in the Eastern Ukraine or heating up conflict with China in the South China Sea.

The U.S. companies that make money off wars, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Raytheon, would of course favor another war with more sales of aircraft, drones, rockets and fuel to wage such a war.

Other Capitol elements favoring war include the Israel lobby, which wants to see American public concern diverted from what Israel is doing in Gaza and from pressing it for renewed negotiations with the Palestinians over the future of the Israel-Palestine territory. American forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria would serve as useful distraction in that regard from the point of view of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and his American supporters.

Also favoring increased U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Syria would be the usual mindless warmongers such as Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina . . . .

Yastreblyanski thinks that President Obama isn’t digging the war drums. A nugget (emphasis in the original):

To judge whether it’s true or not, the best criterion is to look not at the relative seniority of those Senior Officials who are “unnamed because they were not authorized to speak” but at Obama’s own words, even if they’re as vague as Eisenhower. In the case of Syria, they’re not vague at all, falling under the rubric of the “Don’t do stupid shit” doctrine: Obama has always been against bombing Syria, no matter what the Anonymi say, not because he’s a hippie (alas!), or out of some grand global design we can’t see, but because to do so would be stupid.

George Smith. Read it.

Thom explains that war is not something that just happens over there, however much the mongers of war would have you believe that that’s the case.

Reg Henry reflects (emphasis added):

If only righteous violence could solve all problems, life would be much easier. But the dragon’s teeth keep being sowed and the violence keeps happening. You’d think we’d learn.

(snip)

But to blame this president (for Iraq–ed.) you must also blame his predecessor, He Who Must Not be Blamed (according to his apologists), for getting us into this sorry mess in the first place. Sooner or later this was bound to happen. From the moment of the U.S. invasion, the only uncertainty was the exact date of the eventual unraveling. Soon it will be Afghanistan’s turn.

Those who say we should stay in these countries have missed the point. A policy of never-ending occupation and war is not a feasible policy; it is an admission of policy failure.

Read the rest.

Noz:

I think Americans have a hard time accepting the fact that the U.S. military is not capable of solving most problems. Whenever something horrible happen, people say “we must do something”, which for some reason mostly seems to mean using the military to kill someone in another country. There is rarely any serious thought about whether such killing is likely to improve things over the long run. I think the record is fairly clear that the opposite is the case.

He’s quite correct, you know. Thinking that something must always be done leads to doing the wrong something more often than not.

Viet Nam veteran Rick Whalen, writing in the Bangor Daily News, remembers the past–another war based on another lie. A nugget:

Capt. John Herrick, in command of the two destroyers, sent messages that “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar operators may have accounted for the reports” of the attack. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara read these messages but failed to inform Johnson. It was later established this “attack” never happened.

On Aug. 7, 1964, the U.S. Congress, without being informed of Herrick’s recent messages, overwhelmingly passed what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving the president permission to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia without a declaration of war. This resolution was the basis for all of our military activities there. It was based on an incident that never happened.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of that attack that never happened — the beginning of a war based on a lie. Fifty years later, there’s much we can learn from our government’s breach of the people’s trust.

Follow the link to see what lessons he learned.

What Thoreau said.

Via Kos.