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that's pretty tight
that's pretty tight
The president can make it up as he goes along, and we all go along, even though he ain't the originator of the kin.
much easier when the remote control bombs fall so far away. the consequences are felt in a world we hardly perceive outside of official announcements about it
the phase of media saturation has clearly passed
we're in lala land now
a new big war could be clarifying, but who wants that?
“Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”
So Mr "Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff", what are you going to do, what do you suggest, about scaling back the fully autonomous, self-generating, all-powerful MIC that is already fully detached from The American People (except for the kids suckered into sacrificing the minds, bodies, lives in "patriotic" service?
The only catastrophe Mike Mullen sees is not enough bodies tricked into wasting in the MIC's self-enriching, planet-wide, endless "wars".
Succintly put...and a disturbing realization of the emerging warrior caste. Great post, MB.
Tom Dispatch, Astore, Engelhardt are progressive.
Would AC have published/reviewed this in, say, hyper-patriotic/fear-mongered 2003, 2004 when dubya was in office?
GWOT was a war of choice when Carter, Reagan, and Bush were in office. They did nothing or in some cases emboldened the terrorists. Clinton absolutely emboldened them and Bush too before 9-11. However now it is not like GWOT is some kind of mythical creature Neo-cons created. It is easy to sit on the sidelines not getting the security briefings and think we can go back to isolationists and be safe. I am completely against being the world's police and think we do need a clear cut mission for every battleground we fight in the GWOT. But to just dismiss it would be a terrible idea.Even our vaunted Global War on Terror is a war of choice. Think about it: Who has control over our own terror: us or our enemies? We can only be terrorized in the first place if we choose to give in to fear.
Wars of Necessity vs. Wars of Choice
WW2's nation building mentality is what got us into this. We cannot rebuild a nation into something that even resembles a functioning democracy. When we make embargos and liens on other nations, we are creating acts of war without worrying about rebuilding them into a brittish style parliamentary government.
We could have done the same thing after ww2. Just up and left. We could have dropped the two on Japan and taken out their strategic islands the same and then just went back to Hawaii too. That definition could have been used in all our wars. Especially in the Civil War. Defeated the confederates and went back-not worrying about reconstruction.How do we know these are wars of choice? It’s simple: because we could elect to leave whenever we wanted or whenever the heat got too high, as is currently the case in Iraq (even if we are leaving behind a fortress embassy the size of the Vatican with a private army of 5,000 rent-a-guns to defend it), and as we are likely to do in Afghanistan sometime in the years after the 2012 presidential election. The choice is ours. The people without a choice are of course the Iraqis and Afghans whom we’ll leave to pick up the pieces.
"WW2's nation building mentality is what got us into this"
The Marshall plan was a way to get Euro nations liquid enough to buy from US's untouched and war-over-capacity industrial base as Europeans rebuilt.
Yes, it was nation building, but the nation to be built (more) was USA.
There is a difference, we didn't have to go to Iraq. They didn't attack us, we CHOSE to go there. Going into Afghanistan we could have gone in, gotten Bin Laden (and other A-Q brass) then left.
Well we did. Pretty soon we gave up on that too.
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