Drumbeats category archive

Excerpt:

It’s consistent with their belief that every single problem in the world can be solved if we invade . . . .

This notion that we can kill . . . our way to security is fundamentally flawed.

At Asia Times, Gareth Porter examines the United States’s contrarian counter-productive policy regarding Iran. A nugget:

The prospects for agreement (on Iran’s reducing its uranium enrichment efforts–ed.) are not likely to improve before that meeting, however, mainly because of an inflexible US diplomatic posture that reflects President Barack Obama’s need to bow to the demands of Israel and the US Congress on Iran policy.

The US hard line in the Baghdad talks and the failure to set the stage for an early agreement with Iran means that Iran will not only increase but accelerate its accumulation of 20% enriched uranium, which has been the ostensible reason for wanting to get Iran to the negotiating table quickly.

Read the whole thing.

Playing their old, sweet song, because life is meaningless without fresh enemies.

The easier it becomes to kill, the more difficult it is to stop killing.

Via Thoreau.

When General Sherman said, “War is hell,” he didn’t intend it to be used as an excuse for hellish behavior; he meant is as a warning.

Field hears the rhythm of endless war.

John McCain wants to blow up more stuff.

Sign the petition.

Noz asks the question.

I’ll propose one possible answer: When persons feel threatened, they stop thinking. When persons stop thinking, they are more susceptible to con artists and flim-flam men.

Steve Chapman discusses the efforts of the neocons and others who think bombs are always best to drum up another Great and Glorious War. A nugget:

The prevailing wisdom among policymakers,* in short, bears an eerie resemblance to the Iraq consensus of 2002. We and the Israelis allegedly faced an intolerable peril from a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction and a lust for aggression. Fortunately, we were told, it was nothing that -a short, sudden military attack wouldn’t solve.

(snip)

This panic requires a total disregard for everything we have learned during the nuclear age. Since World War II, assorted enemies and rivals have acquired nuclear stockpiles: the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan and North Korea. All of them have learned that they are useless as offensive weapons against other nuclear states and their allies.

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*I don’t think it’s a prevailing wisdom among policymakers, but just among those who monger and hunger for war, but they are a vocal lot with the ear of the press.

. . .by raining death from the skies in far away places with strange sounding names.

Dick Destiny explains.

No one will say it in formal circles: Use of drones outside the US is all about bombing paupers or — ahem — the impoverished places of the world, if something less blunt sounding is needed. That’s the US strategic plant coupled to the story on budget cuts. It’s a strategic triad with two of legs — drones and special forces — aimed at going after people who largely cannot defend themselves in any serious way, always poorer, weaker, and generally of different color and religion in desperate regions. And the third leg of the triad — the Navy — is aimed at people who definitely can shoot back, the Chinese. But whom we won’t get into a war with for the obvious reason that they make all our pipe and wires and telephones and computers and underwear and everything else except drones and most of the kit that the special forces use.

One wonders when it becomes killing fighting merely for the sake of killing fighting.

Follow the link for the rest.

“You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.–Willam Randolph Hearst.

I’ll quote noz, who said, in a post on something else:

a related issue is the persistent double standard about how we talk about other nations. american candidates regularly and openly discuss which foreign countries they want to attack. but if a foreign leader or potential leader ever did anything like that, the american press would go completely apeshit.

At the Asia Times, Yong Kwon analyzes the latest drumbeats:

The pervasiveness of the tendency to forward coercive measures is evident in the recent report published by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Senior research associate Michael Mazza argues that the US should pursue the short-term goal of wiping out North Korea’s power projection capacities and the long term goal of demolishing the regime. [1]

This contention has always been popular among Americans who believe that the United States should actively utilize its massive military and economic might to neutralize international threats.

The simple logic behind the coercive approach is attractive, but dangerous if not completely irresponsible.

Atrios summed up the endless war approach to foreign policy quite well.

Steve Chapman discusses the wingnut lust for war with Iran. A nugget:

Hello? A U.S. attack on a Middle Eastern country that has not attacked us and poses no threat to our security, out of panic over alleged weapons of mass destruction? Haven’t we tried that, and didn’t we learn anything about starting wars we don’t know how to end?

The rumble of the drums, having faded, starts to become louder.

Thoreau hears the war mongers mongering war with Iran with other persons’ children once more, because Afghanistan and the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq have worked out so well.

A nugget:

The great thing about being a hawk is that if the people you wish to attack are rational and self-interested you can argue in favor of attacking them because they aren’t crazy enough to, say, fight back. Conversely, if they aren’t rational and self-interested you must attack them because they might attack you.

Of course, the fact that they are rational and self-interested apparently doesn’t mean that we should try anything drastic like, say, negotiating.

In the world of wingnut poliltical theory, the road to media success is intellectual failure. The resolution to what’s happening in Iran lies in Iran, not in the U. S.

Gary Kamiya on the resurgence of the Iran warmongers:

One of the things the neocons would like the rest of us to forget is that they were the most ardent proponents of invading the very country whose people they now piously claim to support. Back in the heady “Mission Accomplished” days, the neocon slogan was “Wimps go to Baghdad — real men go to Tehran.” Leaving aside the fact that the neocons were a bunch of paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks who never “went” anywhere that didn’t have room service, the point is that they have been burning to attack Iran for years — an attack that would inevitably result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Yes, some of them claimed that invading Iran would be a cakewalk, that the long-suffering Iranian people would welcome Americans as liberators, and so on. (Some of them even managed to keep a straight face while saying this.) And if you believe them, there’s a bridge in Fallujah I’d like to sell you.