I consider Ted a friend and agree with a good portion of what he’s written, unfortunately for him and the rest of us, his case against Iran is useless. Ted wrote a informative, well researched and thought provoking paper, too bad he missed the majority of voters…..here is the reaction in Kansas and how the Republicans will get their war.
Reaction to Ted “Ugh this paper is nearly a page long and he’s from NY….yawn”
Romney-“9/11, Muslim, Terrorists, High gas prices”
Done and done.
The war personally (troops/veterans) make up less than 1% of the population, there will be no WWII style rationing, most people will never travel to Iran or meet an Iranian as well as never befriend a US soldier. I’m a former veteran and I’ve never met a group of people (not all but the majority) that were so rah rah for the cause that they refuse to believe anything outside of the Army vision, most Americans want to believe in the good of the US government anything outside of that would cause their world to come crashing down.
3 Comments.
Yes but…
The failure of Obama to live up to people’s expecatations has put a dent in some people’s beliefs in the US government.
The Bush/Obama/FED disaster on the economy has done the same.
The concrete certainty that the US is the best country on earth is starting to show some cracks.
Or do I believe all this because I don’t have a TV?
B
I fear, given quite a few years observation, that KJP is right. Vietnam was clearly unwinnable, but there was no way for the US to get out.
World War II gave us the demon of ‘appeasement,’ based on Churchill’s partly correct analysis, The Gathering Storm. Hitler made anti-Semitic proclamations in ’33, plus promises to retake the ethnic German lands lost after WWI. The former was evil and a moral justification, the latter a violation of Versailles and a legal justification for the UK to march in and force a bloodless regime change. Churchill was correct, but the UK did nothing.
In ’35, Churchill said, regime change would have required a police action with some casualties, but a relatively minor loss of life. Again, correct. And again, the UK did nothing.
In ’38, Chamberlain agreed to let Hitler take Czechoslovakia, when Churchill said the UK would have had a difficult battle, but victory would have been certain. Here, I’m inclined to think Chamberlain was right, that Britain needed to wait until the radar shield was up, and to fight close to Dunkirk where the BEF could be evacuated rather than annihilated. But Churchill said that, when Chamberlain appeased Hitler in ’38, it meant that when Chamberlain finally declared war in ’39, the Nazis were so strong that they easily defeated the combined Anglo-French forces in a few weeks.
Using that logic, the US military industrial complex convinced the US voters that not fighting the Communists throughout the world would lead to a Communist takeover of the US, with a single brand of toothpaste and queues for meat. And the voters agreed to support insane military actions that put billions into the pockets of the executives of that military industrial complex. The ’72 election is an excellent case in point.
Now, of course, the threat is much worse than just burning our Bibles and closing our churches. If we don’t give the military industrial complex a blank check, we’ll have all our Bibles replaced with Korans, all our churches converted into mosques, only one brand of Islamic tooth cleaning stick, and queues for goat meat. And the ’04 election showed that most US voters agree that we cannot appease those whose only goal is to impose Sharia law on the US. No one knows who ‘those’ are, but still, the threat of Sharia means we have to fight them on the beaches, in the deserts, everywhere in the world except the US. And the military industrial complex must have its trillions.
The US is a democracy, the majority are convinced that anything except total war on the jihadists (whoever they are) will lead to Sharia in the US, and the majority must have their way.
In case anyone should think that michaelwme is indulging in satirical hyperbole, this is what Lt General James Mattis told a graduating class of Marines in a lecture humorously titled “Ethical Challenges in Contemporary Conflict: The Iraq and Afghanistan Cases”:
“If this enemy wins, I can tell you— having been up very close and very personal with them—that not
one of our ladies will ever hold a job or go to school again or drive a car. Every one of you will pray a certain way every day. When they say they want to come to America and kill all the Jews
who are here, they mean every word they say.”