"Why of course the people don’t want war...But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Nazi leader Hermann Goering, Nuremberg, 1946
"I just want to say this very clearly. A war with Iran is madness, and a disaster in the making. Do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise." - -Chris Hayes, last night, signing off on 'All In'
"The idea that- regardless of what we have in casualties, we must respond, is absurd. We cannot allow the idea to spread that the president of the United States can will nilly drag this country into this type of quagmire again.
Every single Democratic presidential candidate should come out tonight and say no war with Iran. Every single member of the Democratic caucus in the House and the Senate should be baking the bills by Tim Kaine, Bernie Sanders and Mo Kanna in the House - and stopping the legal auspices for this war' -Sam Seder, media specialist on 'All In' last night.
"I think it's very important for the American people to step up and say there should be no war with Iran. There is a possibility of de-escalation but it requires sane voices and cool heads - certainly from Democrats in congress- who do not want to put service men and women in harm's way and to jeopardize the safety o the American people." - Former Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards, last night on 'All In'.
"All you're hearing is the most extreme voices on either side, like the U.S. defense secretary saying he will be happy not to start a war but to finish a war. Then Iran's regime leaders saying they're going to target Israel and Dubai. Then the U.S. president says he will respond disproportionately. So you can see how these countries are not communicating at all.
All of this is born out of the U.S. dumping the Iran nuclear agreement, which allowed communication between the two countries. That level of commuication now just doesn't exist when you need it the most." -Journalist Cal Perry last night on MSNBC, reporting from Qatar
"We did not need to be here tonight if Donald Trump had not torn up the Iran nuclear deal. While the deal was in place Iran wasn't launching rockets at U.S. bases, wasn't launching its nuclear program, wasn't attacking shipping in the Gulf. All upended once we pulled out of the deal, so it was a huge error to do it and why we're in the mess we are in - which is a huge crisis of Donald Trump's making.
At the end of the day the only way to escape a cycle of escalation is to have a channel to properly assess what the other side's intentions are. Just getting whipped up into a frenzy and saying 'they hit us now we have to hit them' is how we end up in a war nobody really wanted..." - Jake Sullivan, former national security assistant to VP Joe Biden, last night, on 'All In'.
"This has been wrought by the judgment of a president who was very clear over the course of his tenure that he knows more than all the generals. We have seen the diplomatic corps of the United States utterly gutted. We have policy made by tweet, by watching Fox and Friends. There is no indication other than in a fantasy land universe that this is the moment we will see judiciousness on the part of the president of the United States.
The chance that the United Stated will allow a missile attack to go unanswered is very low. .. so now we stand at a most dangerous hour, and this could very quickly become a wider regional war. So we stand at the most dangerous moment in the Middle East that we have lived in for our lifetimes.." - Steve Schmidt, former Republican campaign adviser (to Sen. John McCain), last night on 'All In'
While the Klingon motto has always been that "revenge is a dish best served cold" , Iran didn't really have quite that luxury after Trump assassinated Qassem Suleimani in a reckless drone strike mere days ago. So now, from the news last night, we know it has launched more than a dozen missiles at U.S. military sites in Iraq in retaliation for the killing last week of its top general, also a popular figure. But no one was killed, by most recent reports - so it was more a 'display' aggression - to show the Iranian people that the assassination of one of the country's most popular figures would not go unpunished. Hence, the ball is in the U.S. court as to whether we march to full scale war or not. (Current NY Times reporting as I write this is that Trump has 'backed away from further military conflict' - but we all know Dotard Donnie has changed his febrile mind on a dime in the past.)
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The question on everyone's mind is how will the U.S. respond? Violently, in disproportionate aggression, given we have a belligerent madman at the helm - and under political pressure from the specter of an impeachment trial ? Or smartly backing off with the realization that further escalation is not in this nation's interest, or the region's or the world's? (And after all, Dotard committed the initial true escalation by assassinating a high-ranking foreign official. Definitely NOT a proportional response to a few protests at the U.S. Embassy.)
The jury is still out as we await what many of us fear will be yet another precipitous and disproportionate response which will lead to the worst conflict since Vietnam. So as we teeter on the cusp of yet another unnecessary war - which will likely make 'Nam look like a walk in the park- it is instructive to examine how we mutated into a nation that seems to want to start wars more than pursue diplomacy.
JFK noted in his Pax Americana speech at American University in June, 1963, that we don't have the money or the resources to pursue endless conflicts. Given the exploding deficits of this country right now (with military spending annually consuming 55 cents of every dollar of the national budget) , it's high time the U.S. cease pursuing ruinous policies of "Pax Americana" - in trying to force its will on other nations at the point of weapons of war.
How did the American war state get going? How did we reach a state of almost perma-war, with one conflict succeeding another in rapid succession? It helps to gain a historical perspective. If one looks back at the document track, one can pretty well discern that the incentive to meddle in other nations’ affairs – as part of U.S. foreign policy – probably commenced with The National Security Council (NSC) Directive ‘NSC 10/2’ on June 18, 1948. A key element therein warned that all activities to be conducted against “hostile” foreign states – on in support of “friendly” ones, were to be executed so that “no U.S. Government responsibility would be evident to any unauthorized persons.” The provision also had to be included that if such activities were discovered “the U.S. Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”
Ratcheting up the effect, and consolidating the impetus to Empire- building was the document NSC-68, prepared by Paul Nitze of The National Security Council – completed by 1950. The document essentially contained the blueprint for unending strife and undeclared wars, all of which would be invoked on the basis of a zero tolerance threshold for foreigners’ misbehavior. The putative basis? To enable U.S. agitation, overthrow (or assassination) of democratically-elected leaders, and large and small occupations (ranging from the few thousand troops in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to more than 200,000 in Iraq by 2006.) The motivating force of the document was clear in this regard:“a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere”.
In other words, a warmonger's wet dream. Any place for which the U.S. even remotely construed a “defeat of free institutions” gave it license to intervene at will. This critical aspect is described thusly by Morris Berman[1]:
“Nitze emphasized the importance of perception, arguing that how we were seen was as crucial as how militarily secure we actually were. This rapidly expanded the number of interests deemed relevant to national security”.
In other words, it provided the formula for unending war, and the building of Empire. Gore Vidal pinpoints the emergence of the American Empire when he notes[2]:
“Since 1950 the United States has fought perhaps a hundred overt and covert wars. None was declared by the nominal representatives of the American people in Congress…they had meekly turned over to the executive their principal great power to wage war. That was the end of that Constitution”.
The key point to note here is not only did the U.S. invoke a specious doctrine[3] to entitle it to engage in warfare wherever it deemed the “need” (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) but also to take out democratically elected leaders where and when they threatened U.S. corporate interests, such as Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953)- threatened U.S. Oil interests, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954)- threatened United Fruit Corp. by giving land to farmers, and Salvador Allende in Chile (1972)- strategic interests threatened.Even when specious doctrines weren't invoked, lies and deceptions often were in order to involve the U.S. in massive troop deployments and years of ruinous (to lives and treasure) military intrusions. For example, LBJ employed the ruse of the North Vietnamese firing on the Maddox and Turner Joy in international waters in August, 1964 as the basis to ramp up the Vietnam War. Similarly, Bush and Cheney employed the ruse that Saddam had "WMD" to justify Operation "Iraqi Freedom" (a bogus name if ever there was one) and invade Iraq - which had not one damned thing to do with 9/11. (Though the numbskulls who watched FAUX News would argue with that!)
Meanwhile, at last count, the estimates (by the World Health Organization) of the total number of Iraqi civilians killed in the Iraq War, exceeds 600,000. And in Afghanistan we beold the ongoing drain of the longest war on record, going on 19 years, to the tune of $3b a month. The dead have ranged from ordinary Afghans slain in misplaced gunfire on the streets of Kandahar to wedding parties obliterated by remote drones. As with Vietnam, when so many innocents were butchered (and others' saw crops destroyed by Agent Orange), this does not win hearts and minds. Rather, those hearts and minds side with the enemy when the mighty power isn’t around or bashing doors down and hurlng terrified occupants on the floor.
But why be amazed that our representatives voted for this atrocity, any more than that they voted for the misguided Patriot Act (in 2002), or the Military Commissions Act in 2006 which repeals habeas corpus, or the 'National Defense Authorization Act'? Do freedoms, real ones, matter any more? How can they when the most despicable provisions of the Patriot Act – which had been due for expiry in February, 2010- were re-approved by the cowed Senate? To remind readers, these provisions include allowances for “black bag” searches of one’s home and papers without any consent or knowledge- in total and direct violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. (But since 83% of the country can't name 6 of the Bill of Rights, maybe they don't even matter any more!) I wasn't personally amazed given I'd already seen callow Dems - led by Sen. Tom Daschle- rush to approve the bogus 'Iraq War Resolution' in 2002. Thus did congress again cede its war- making authority and give Bush Jr. full scope to start his own war- to follow up daddy's invasion in 1991.
The sad and inescapable fact is that we won't be able to stop either the warmongers or the excesses of the Military-Industrial Complex until and unless we cease to glorify war. Yes, we know the "lizard brain" still dominates in most of humanity, but that doesn't mean we must give it license to govern and rule our lives - including allowing our whole domestic infrastructure to deteriorate to ruin, while we engage in ever more unprovoked wars. Or the current case we have now - of one unfit to lead lunatic poseur (Donald Trump) initiating war to distract the news cycle and American populace from his own political peril.
As former Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson put it in the immediate wake of Suleimani's murder, when we needed a JFK at the helm we have instead a demented reprobate named Donald Trump. Watch for this despicable buffoon to get us deeper into a conflict that we don't need or want, all to appease his own pernicious and pathological ego.
Update: The Iranian regime has now admitted two of its surface-to -air missiles struck a Ukrainian airline with the loss of 176 lives, nearly half of them Iranians. This was after one of their missile batteries mistook the airliner for a U.S. cruise missile. Let us note, however, Trump was ultimately to blame for this tragedy by initiating the strike on Suleimani based on LIES and no genuine intel that he was planning an attack on 4 U.S. Embassies. This was admitted by defense secretary Mark Esper on Face the Nation Sunday. Trump's reckless drone assassination then precipitated an outcry amongst the populace for revenge, which Iran sated with its missile barrage. But had Trump not taken out the Quds Force leader no missile attack - a show attack- would have been needed. The causal chain then traces directly back to Trump's lawless assassination drone strike as the trigger for the train of events that took down the airliner with all lives lost. See :
The sad and inescapable fact is that we won't be able to stop either the warmongers or the excesses of the Military-Industrial Complex until and unless we cease to glorify war. Yes, we know the "lizard brain" still dominates in most of humanity, but that doesn't mean we must give it license to govern and rule our lives - including allowing our whole domestic infrastructure to deteriorate to ruin, while we engage in ever more unprovoked wars. Or the current case we have now - of one unfit to lead lunatic poseur (Donald Trump) initiating war to distract the news cycle and American populace from his own political peril.
As former Lt. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson put it in the immediate wake of Suleimani's murder, when we needed a JFK at the helm we have instead a demented reprobate named Donald Trump. Watch for this despicable buffoon to get us deeper into a conflict that we don't need or want, all to appease his own pernicious and pathological ego.
Update: The Iranian regime has now admitted two of its surface-to -air missiles struck a Ukrainian airline with the loss of 176 lives, nearly half of them Iranians. This was after one of their missile batteries mistook the airliner for a U.S. cruise missile. Let us note, however, Trump was ultimately to blame for this tragedy by initiating the strike on Suleimani based on LIES and no genuine intel that he was planning an attack on 4 U.S. Embassies. This was admitted by defense secretary Mark Esper on Face the Nation Sunday. Trump's reckless drone assassination then precipitated an outcry amongst the populace for revenge, which Iran sated with its missile barrage. But had Trump not taken out the Quds Force leader no missile attack - a show attack- would have been needed. The causal chain then traces directly back to Trump's lawless assassination drone strike as the trigger for the train of events that took down the airliner with all lives lost. See :
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[1] Morris Berman: 2006, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, W.W. Norton, page 118.
[2] Gore Vidal: 2002, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunders Mouth, p. 124.
[3] Of course, the ignominious “Bush Doctrine” – crafted under the auspices of the 2002 National Security Strategy – was even more noisome and outrageous, allowing for pre-emptive war as it made Iraq the gold standard for precedence. See: Berman, op. cit., p. 203.
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