Drumbeats category archive

In wingnut world, war is a magickal thing (emphasis added):

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) is taking on the White House for not explicitly threatening a “military strike” on Iran, which he called “magic words” that would prevent the country from obtaining military weapons.

Speaking at the United Nations on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said that containment was not an option and the U.S. would “do what we must” to stop Iran.

But during an interview with MSNBC, Giuliani said that the implicit threat of military force did not go far enough.

. . . because the last two invocations to bloody Mars cast a magickal spell unbroken to this day in the fantastickal wingnut world sans history and accordingly sans lessons therefrom.

And, besides, other people have children to spare.

Delaware Dem’s musings are worth a look.

It’s a bipartisan problem.

I will point out, though, that it’s the Republicans who want yet another war.

Excerpt from Robert Greenwald in the interview:

The pundits who welcomed this war, many who welcomed the Iraq war . . . , how many times must they be wrong for us to say, “Stop . . . .”

Back in the 1930s, there was the “Merchants of Death” theory. Indeed, some of the first “Saint” novels were set against the background of that theory.

It is now widely considered to be discredited.

Remember the old children’s laxative commercial which started “Prunes: Is one enough? Are three too many?”

Congress is singing a similar tune about wars. Asia Times reports:

In another resolution apparently designed to prepare for war against Iran, the US House of Representatives, in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 401-11 vote, has passed a resolution (HR 568) urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

With its earlier decision to pass a bill that effectively sought to ban any negotiations between the United States and Iran, a huge bipartisan majority of Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

(snip)

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, noted how “this resolution reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war, and could be the precursor for a war with Iran. It’s effectively a thinly-disguised effort to bless war.”

One more time: The old lie. The young die.

Image via Balloon Juice.

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.

___________________

*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.