Endless War category archive

From the AP wires (full story at the link):

A dozen years later, American politics has reached a rough consensus about the Iraq War: It was a mistake.

No, no, no, no.

Mismatching socks is a mistake.

The Great and Glorious Patriotic War of a Lie in Iraq was not a mistake.

Mistakes are accidents. Cons are on purpose. Same like “Republican Family Values,” it was a con. It was a purposeful orchestrated well-planned-out con, and the con artists still profit thereby.

Sending people to their deaths for a lie is not a “mistake.” It’s a crime, and the criminals have not and likely will not face justice.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

I haven’t paid much attention to Seymour Hersch’s story about the killing of Bin Laden because anyone who expects honesty and transparency about anything involving the CIA or the NSA, however tangentially, is delusional. Duplicity, nay! triplicity is their stock in trade.

Also, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn how the CIA got their information.

If you give a damn, Shaun Mullen has a masterful analysis of the story so far.

Jon Stewart cross-examines Judith Miller, clueless shill, on her role in mongering the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq.

Below the fold in case it autoplays.

Read more »

Noah Feldman explores the myth of the surgical strike as regards robotic death raining from the sky. A snippet:

It’s true that the operator of an armed drone can deliver a missile to a site that’s been carefully scoped out by other drones. But conventional aircraft could use that same intelligence to deliver missiles with similar precision (and a similar margin for error).The real military advantage of the armed-drone strike over a conventional airstrike, then, isn’t the precision of the hit. It’s the fact that a pilot isn’t being put in jeopardy. Yet somehow the idea that drone strikes are more precisely targeted has lingered, giving the technique greater public appeal.

Do read the rest.

Will Bunch sums it up.

Read J. M. Ashby on the cover-up.

(I found a better embed and replaced the first one, which was up for only about five minutes.)

Addendum, Early that Afternoon:

Noz looks behind the bluster:

Once again, I think what Israeli critics really fear about the Iranian nuclear deal is rapprochement between Iran and the West. A lot has happened since the U.S. broke off relations with Iran in 1979. These days there are a growing number of issues that Iran and the U.S.are effectively on the same side (the fight against ISIS is the obvious example). That prospect, not a nuclear deal, is what really terrifies the Israelis, and for that matter Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, the other members of the GCC, and Egypt.

Via Job’s Anger.

Trevor Timm, writing at The Guardian, finds the Republican response to the tentative agreement with Iran to consider an agreement, to be quite telling.

A small part of the Middle East may soon be off limits to US bombing and killing, so naturally Republicans and their neocon allies are furious.

The tentative Iran deal announced on 3 April, in which Western leaders and the Islamic republic agreed on strict limits to Iran’s nuclear program, was hailed by many as a breakthrough, given that it could avert yet another US-led war in the Middle East. So almost immediately, it was denounced by key conservative members of Congress, neocons, and Republican presidential candidates, whose unquenched thirst for blood almost always outweighs their supposed commitment to peace.

Do read the rest.

Thom and his guests investigate why the Republican Party is trying to sabotage talks with Iran.

Via Job’s Anger.

Read Tom Levenson.

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.

The new “normal” in America is war: The 9/11 attacks happened more than 13 years ago, which means that no teenagers in America can truly remember a time when the country was at peace. “War time” is their normal; peace, a fairy tale.

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.