Most 'Muricans Want Ground War With ISIS - Falling Into the "ISIS Trap"

 " 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.” - Hermann Goering, Nuremberg, 1946

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Americans are full of raging war 'roids and ready to dispatch tens of thousands of ground troops to fight ISIS. Specifically, 62 percent of registered voters - who are supposed to be a tad smarter than rocks - want U.S. ground troops committed to another failed combat effort sure to inflate the ISIS rats and their recruits more than achieve any victory. Elias Isquith, noting the figures in a recent salon.com piece,  actually asked: "Are we insane?" 

Well, yes "we" are -  at least those of us who get the bulk of our "news" from the corporate media and especially from the propagandists at FOX (who can't even 'fess up to Billo O'Reilly's multiple lies - from being in the Falklands war zone, to being present when a key HSCA Kennedy assassination witness was murdered.)

But this is what one can expect when a people are half-educated, ignorant and lack critical thinking skills, in which case they become malleable tools to be molded by the PR and propaganda machines.   And we've seen this dog and pony war beat show before, about a year and a half ago when neocons were clamoring for a Syria intervention.

Most cooler heads at the time were able to see through it and as they saw the polls climb for intervention some even noted a "herd mentality" taking root. One of these was Hillary Mann Leverett, professor at American University, who on one Steve Kornacki 'UP' show, observed we had no business barging into Syria - which effects would arguably be even more catastrophic and dunning than those from barging into Iraq.

Prof. Leverett compared that drumbeat  " to the lead up to the war in Iraq" and she ought to have known as she was in the Bush White House and also dealing with Congressional Democrats, and with members of the media. She went on:

"The herd mentality which took over to buy into the Bush administration's narrative that Saddam had to have chemical weapons of mass destruction and was determined to use them, was something unquestioned. ....it was not only a mistake, it was based on manufactured evidence. "


In  the case of Iraq, too many citizens played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed "unpatriotic" or  "terrorist sympathizers".  Many of us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example (in 'The Shock Doctrine'), referenced “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni”  In a nutshell, too many Americans had “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions."

 

This is tragic, and what has led to the operative herd mentality that comes up every time our  collective consciousness is hijacked by overwrought emotions.  Because if Americans can’t or won’t exercise their minds to think critically, especially concerning our national history and consequences of our actions, then we stand to be led into more reckless wars.

 

This thing with ISIS is no different, and as a recent (Mar. 9) highly excellent piece in TIME noted (yes, they do have a few) Americans would be making the biggest error ever in falling for the ISIS trap.  As the authors write (p. 31):

 

"ISIS is taunting the world to run the cycle (of war) one more time....As bad as these people are, there is room for things to get much worse. And they will unless the U.S. and its coalition has the discipline at last to think all the way through to the end. The question is not beating ISIS. It's what comes after that. More than ever the question needs an answer."

 

What comes after that? The multiple authors aren't afraid to broach their views, with which I wholeheartedly agree (ibid.):

 

"The U.S. showed in 1991 and again in 2003 that it knows how to take down enemies in Iraq. What it has never shown is an ability to leave something better afterward."

 

But until it does, ever new crops of terrorists will emerge. From the region's overall degradation of civil society, leading to: "mass unemployment, resentment, suspicion and sense of victimhood" .  These are the human factors that need addressing in the Middle East, especially the conflict -torn regions like Iraq, Syria and Libya. Sure, it's easy to treat all inimical problems like a "nail" and wield a "hammer" to solve them  - but that only leads you back to more conflicts, i.e. that require more "hammers".

 

This again takes us back to State Dept. spokesperson Marie Harf's recent comment which I cited yesterday:

"We cannot kill our way out of this war" 

 

Referring to the current conflict with ISIS.  Well, we certainly cannot if that means once more committing tens of thousands of ground troops - especially after we beheld how that worked out before with Iraq- an intervention that laid the path for ISIS.

 

And let's go even further back in the mists of time to how all these terrorists managed to manifest thanks to our stupid manipulations during the Reagan era.  As the TIME authors remind us (ibid.):

 

"It's true that some of the same mujahedin trained and armed by the U.S. to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan went on to be the founding fathers of modern jihadist terrorism - men like bin Laden and Mullah Omar, creator of the Taliban."

 

Ouch! The truth hurts, doesn't it? The authors go on with even more truth:

 

"No thought was given to what would become of these battle -hardened fanatics after the West was done using them."

 

Yes, indeed. We were too smart by half. Believed we could create this 'Frankenstein' monster to sic on the Russkies but never dreamed it would stay alive and come back to wreak havoc....on US! Hubris anyone?

 

Americans, as fearful as they are about ISIS beheadings and having ISIS zombies appear at Malls, need to get a grip and not allow  themselves to be converted to a drooling, mindless herd. This is exactly what the ISIS bugs want, and they're hoping they can taunt us enough to force our weaker politicos and leaders into precipitous action.

 

But if we do we will prove once more we are indeed insane. As Einstein put it: "insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result."

 

 

See also:


http://www.salon.com/2015/03/05/americas_war_fever_is_rising_how_fear_bloodlust_are_bringing_americans_together/

POLITICO Followers - Are They Serious or Serious Morons?

The results of the latest polls in Politico raised eyebrows this morning even from conservative Joe Scarbrough. On his 'Morning Joe' show he looked at the poll results including one - I kid you not -that showed 64 percent believe "the country is totally out of control".  Do these numb nuts even know what "totally out of control" means? Iraq may be "totally out of control" with the ISIS vermin running amuck and pretty much doing what they want. The U.S. is not totally out of control, which shows to me the extent to which certain Americans' minds have been gutted by the Repuke PR machinery.

Even Joe Scarbrough, smiled and blurted:

"Wait! America, you really believe the country is a runaway beer truck? A runaway beer truck!?"

Yes, but please don't generalize this to all Americans. It appears to be instead a deranged subset that follows the hack blog called 'Politico'.  And given just the response here one must question whether these people are even qualified to vote in any objective manner. It instead discloses they have lost touch with reality, and we shouldn't trust those apart from reality to cast a realistic vote.

In another example, a survey showed 38 percent believed Obama to be "less effective" than Bush Jr. Seriously? The only conclusion one can draw here, is these people have short memories - very short! They obviously forgot how Bushie boy suckered us into the Iraq war by putting on a dog and pony show at the UN to try to show the Iraqis had aluminum tubes (for chemical warfare delivery systems) and oh yeah, even the 'yellowcake' showing they were likely making nuclear weapons.

All this huff and puff led to an invasion which many warned against because it would take out the sole secular force keeping the Shia and Sunni factions at bay. No, he was no angel - but let's also recall we armed this guy (Saddam) during the 1980s so he could fight against our then enemy, Iran. When you create a 'monster' you have to take ownership for it, and this was under Reagan.

The instability that followed Saddam's fall at the hands of the U.S. invaders ultimately could be said to have led to the ISIS  upheaval now. (Bear in mind ISIS emerged after the Shia took over the Iraqi government, assisted by the U.S.- via orchestrated "elections", and kept Sunnis excluded.)

Politico people also forget, evidently, how the financial system crashed with the credit crisis on Bush's watch and many are still working to make up for the mammoth chunk lost from their 401ks. (One of our friends lost nearly 50 % of her portfolio).  By contrast, while the economic situation is not totally rosy, we have seen nearly all the jobs lost under Bush (15.8 million) come back, and at least growth (3 percent per annum) as opposed to recession. In addition the stock market has reached all time highs by contrast to the 580+ point drop in the last months of Bush's watch.

The final insult in the Politico polls was the result giving Republicans preference for taking the Senate - by at least 5 percentage points. Really?  A bunch of austerity fetishists responsible not only for inadequately funding the VA, but also the CDC - and who also imposed an insurmountable debt burden on the Post Office - by insisting it fund pensions for 75 years into the future.

These losers have also done nothing, nada. They have consistently blocked most legislation and have been acknowledged as the most do nothing congress ever in history. So why in the hell would any sane and sober person want them in charge of BOTH houses of congress? Perhaps because these people want to see more chaos and gridlock.

Maybe, just maybe, they even have a boner to see the country even more "out of control" - because obviously that is the objective of the GOP.

Create havoc and total gridlock in the process of governance, by using fake filibusters, shut downs and other tactics, then try to convince people that "government can't work".

And yet, they want to hold public office and be in charge of it! Go figure!.

U.S. Political Class Goes Ape Shit Over Putin Op-Ed

Ah, the "land of the free and home of the brave" - which ironically boasts more people in prisons or on probation than China, Russia, Iran and Syria combined. But wait....our troops are fighting for "our freedoms". Puh-leeze!  At least some of this Neoliberal codswallop would be digestible if  the Overclass and its media that run this country were less hypocritical and at least gave a nod to freedom of speech, without getting their panties in a snit and losing it every damned time a meme opposing their own gets high profile circulation.

 But we already saw how that one worked out, when a long forgotten essay by former Univ. of Colorado prof Ward Churchill was found, then circulated and he was run out of his teaching job - based on a university witch hunt that detected "plagiarism". (Interestingly, in a "QA research vetting" wherein they singled out only Churchill.)

Then there was Joe Wilson, who in his New York Times op-ed piece, "What I Didn't Find in Africa", exposed the Bushies'  phony Niger "yellowcake" bunkum (used to justify the Iraq invasion, and which many rightist idiots or disputatious obsessives still believe, e.g. at snopes.com and other enclaves). The entrenched Neocon political class was so outraged that they let Joe have it....or rather his wife, with the subsequent "outing" of  Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. And yet these rat fuckers are still walking around and haven't been hanged yet for treason.

So pardon me if I am compelled to laugh now at the hysterical responses of the new political class where the likes of John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and James Inhofe all bleat their outrage together- like a chorus of cosseted corporate, Neoliberal whores and losers. "Awwww.......Putin got to write a piece in the New York Times, BWAAHAHAHAHAHAAA .....I'm gonna lose my lunch!"

But there it was in full view - with clips featured on Chris Hayes 'ALL IN" last night-   where we beheld the same screeching and hysteria - by the Neoliberal political class assholes, analogous to what we beheld from the Bushite war criminals after Joe Wilson exposed their ruse on yellowcake. (Which, btw, a number of articles in Physics Today have also validated.)


All this huffing, puffing, pissing, farting and moaning after Putin's Op-Ed appeared in The New York Times. There was Nancy Pelosi sputtering and moaning with her head spinning- looking like some poor wretch who'd taken too much Ex-lax - and didn't know where to run, then Sen. Bob Menendez (NJ) bellyaching at how he "wanted to vomit"  after having read it. And last, there was Sen. Jim Inhofe, the illustrious asshole who himself feels he has the right to call global warming a "hoax" over and over- despite the fact his BS may well have postponed action until we're now all for the high jump. But this same asshole imp who declares his "right" to spout  climate rubbish,  is now seen screaming and howling about "having to read such stuff" and "wanting to throw up".

Hey, don't let your barf bag hit you in the ass on the way out, asshole!  You didn't HAVE to read it!  No one forced you to!  The same applies to all the other mealy -mouthed Neolib pols pouting, whining and evidently missing their own hypocrisy in this instance too. Hey, what happened to the "free market of ideas"? Oh wait! It only applies to Neolib rats and scoundrels!

But let's move on to the larger point.

As exposed this morning on CBS News Early Show, the American PR firm Ketchum was behind getting Putin's op-ed expeditiously published a mere day after Obama's "war" speech.  Ketchum is but one PR firm, and there are literally hundreds which do just about everything - from painting positive portraits of our pols when caught with their pants down, to those like BRJames which helped get Assad's wifey into Vogue, to  Hill and Knowlton, which helps the natural gas-fracking bunch promote the myth that fracking poses no harm.(As well as assisting pro-frack pols to get elected.)

My point is that the PR influence is spread throughout our political system as much as lobbying. Indeed, the two are often tied together 'at the hip' with lobbyists often using PR firms in their own goals to either get their clients elected or move public opinion on an issue- such as fracking, or to deny global warming (like Inhofe does). What the Neolib crybabies are really bellyaching over is that Putin had access to an American PR firm (like they do) but now given the capacity to influence American minds, re: the Syria issue and especially the threat of U.S. strikes.

But instead of paying attention to their own use of PR firms and lobbyists,  all our pissant pols instead hypocritically postured by castigating Putin for HIS "posturing" while objecting to a basic freedom most of them take for granted. And I am talking about the Democrat weasels as well as the Repukes. On certain issues, when they all scream the same way, you can really see how they have more in common than one believes, as on the issue of Edward Snowden  - when Chuck Schumer screamed as loud for Snowden's head, as Insane McCain and that moron Lindsey Graham.

So don't get me started on these jackasses and jagoffs. I will take them seriously when they go after Ketchum and their OWN PR firms, as opposed to trying to keep those unsavory facts hidden from us. At least in the case of Putin's op-ed, most savvy Americans already knew that the exceptionalist meme was poisoning the country and leading its military- industrial complex to ever more wars of choice and military spending adventures. We didn't need a bimbo such as Chris Hayes had on last night (from New Republic) trying to tell us that the op-ed was --------- (fill in your epithet)  and Americans ought not buy it. Well, why would we buy claims from politico.com, HuffPo,   The Daily Beast (whose then editor, Tina Brown,  couldn't even get the grassy knoll aspect of the JFK hit right- using it as a joke to ding the Diana conspiracy) or New Republic or any other sources?

What separates the deep politics immersed citizen from the superficial citizen, is that we do our own research from independent sources and arrive at our own conclusions via critical thinking - not Neoliberal group think. (Which was blatantly obvious the way they all came down on the Snowden issue, even "liberal" MSNBC, with the exception of the more intelligent Chris Hayes.)

As opposed to hysterically screeching their heads off, the American political class would have done better to extract the key nuggets from Putin's op-ed as opposed to pissing on all of it, and trying to evoke phony outrage. Especially when most savvy citizens already can see right through them, and the Neoliberal whores and grafters they really are. Need a clue? Look at the polls that showed congress is rated even lower on the 'approve' scale than getting dysentery or West Nile virus!

Can We Avoid the "Herd Mentality" This Time Around? Can We Avoid Committing Rational Evil?

Hillary Mann Leverett, professor at American University, came out swinging with facts and intelligence this morning on Steve Kornacki's 'UP' show, that again- we have no business barging into Syria - which effects would arguably be even more catastrophic and dunning than those from barging into Iraq. And whether we're talking "limited strikes" for "two days" or not.

As Prof. Leverett observed, the current drumbeat is "strikingly similar to the lead up to the war in Iraq" and Prof. Leverett ought to know as she was in the Bush White House and also dealing with Congressional Democrats, and with members of the media. She goes on:

"The herd mentality which took over to buy into the Bush administration's narrative that Saddam had to have chemical weapons of mass destruction and was determined to use them, was something unquestioned. ....it was not only a mistake, it was based on manufactured evidence. Here, no one is asking this basic question except our friends in Moscow: 'What if Assad didn't order this? What if this wasn't a Syrian troop chemical attack. What if this was perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliated oppositionists. The consequences here for going into Syria are even more grave than Iraq. Because if we go into Syria and the al Qaeda groups get away with mass chemical warfare- and that's what happened - and we think they're going to stop there - that's the definition of insanity."

But perhaps the country has been in the throes of national insanity since the 1991 Gulf War and ditching the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome"- which up until then had instilled forbearance in our leaders for taking precipitous military action. After that happened, we got "humanitarian" interventions in Somalia (with disastrous results - merely converting it into a rogue state) and Bosnia, which then led the Clinton cruise missile attack in Sudan - which actually struck a pharmaceutical factory and culminating in the lawless invasion of a sovereign state in Iraq. The latter technically no different from the Nazi  blitzkrieg invasion of Poland in 1939 - which also employed the ruse of Polish terror to justify it.

Maybe people need to read 'The Shock Doctrine' by Naomi Klein, or the essay by Henry Giroux, 'The Politics of Cruelty - America's Descent Into Madness' . The problem, of course, is if the political structure has descended into a putative madness, there will be only a few citizens with the insight to see it and the spine to point it out. This very probability makes the "herd mentality" referenced by Prof. Leverett an ongoing reality.

Anyway, back to the 'UP' program. Kornacki interrupted at one point to ask:

"What would be the evidence?" and adding, "John Kerry put a lot of evidence on the table."

To which Prof. Leverett responded: "Compared to Colin Powell, it's a joke!"

Prof. Leverett then pointed out that the Russians and Chinese didn't pull their people out but went to the last chemical weapons attack sites in March. What did they find? According to her:

"They did forensics on the ground themselves and found two striking things which have not been covered here in the press at home: One was that the rockets used to deliver those chemicals were home made rockets. Not military or industrially produced. The other thing they found is that the sarin was not military ordnance or industrially produced, it didn't include stabilizers. So maybe the Russians have a point."

Well, I would say that sane people have a point and anyone claiming not to be foolish would again have to ask: 'Cui bono?' WHO benefits? Would it be Assad, or al Qaeda oppositionists, just itching to get the U.S. involved to help them neuter Assad so they can take over. THEN we will have not a few thousand terrorists to confront, but likely hundreds of thousands. And I can just see the last remnants of our civil liberties crumbling before my eyes as the last vestiges of constitutional protections are gutted .....oh, in the name of "national security."

As Prof. Leverett concluded:

"The rest of the world does not believe what we're saying for good reason: we made it up before!"

Adding:

"This gets back to the whole point in the set up (Kornacki's intro) that this is not peculiar to Bush, Clinton, or Obama. These decisions, taken with very little thought, including under Clinton-  to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, and to continuously bomb Iraq, bomb Sudan and bomb other places- these are not clean interventions."

Indeed, any highly intelligent race of outside observers (say aliens from another world) would regard our actions as meeting even their definition of insanity. They'd ask why this particular enclave of humanity is so obsessed with fighting terrorism when it appears committed to creating more terrorists.

Hillary's final point was the one I made when blogging that the U.S. has no moral authority to unilaterally attack anyone:

"The United States has no authority to punish".

Bingo! We are not the cops of the world, nor do we possess the unique moral authority given our own acts and complicity in past dastardly deeds as I noted three blogs ago.  Besides, if we set this up as a precedent what other "villains" will we be prepared to take out given we are already reaching a $16.7 trillion debt limit next month?

In my new book (Beyond Atheism, Beyond God) in the section Practical Reason and Human Evil  in the final chapter, I note that one of the canards circulated about human evil is that it’s irrational. If the person only knew better, or reasoned properly, he’d arrive at the generic good, and we'd all be better off.  I cited philosopher John Kekes who disposes of this myth quite forcefully (The Roots of Evil, p. 156.)  

As Kekes observes, abundant historical examples disclose that people often robustly justify their actions on the basis of a good perceived in their minds, but which in retrospect turns out to be evil. Therefore it’s not the lack of reason or rationality that infuses their actions but instead the false beliefs that supported the reasoning!

As examples of rational evil  one can cite all supposedly "rational justifications" for aggressive national policy, including military occupations of sovereign states, targeted military attacks, and the implementation of economic evil such as austerity policies- which harm millions.

A case in point for the first is George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, begun after 9/11. Launched after that horrific event nearly twelve years ago, it had been driven with all the best intentions to find and kill all those responsible for the deed that left nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center. But in the aftermath what did we actually see? Well, an invasion of a sovereign state (Iraq) that had nothing to do with 9/11, and which left nearly 600,000 Iraqis dead according to World Health Organization statistics. Added to that, the widespread use of the most debasing torture methods (used by the CIA) to extract information including on bin Laden’s hiding place. The combined American occupations, unpaid for in additional taxes, left the U.S. with nearly $4 trillion in deficits that have now come back to haunt us. These have the nation facing the specter of even more draconian cuts to the most vulnerable citizens under the specious rubric of “sequestration."


Bush and his minions truly believed they were doing good at the time they demanded congress vote on The Iraq War Resolution in 2002, never mind what we later discovered[1]. Bush’s aggressive foreign policies also exposed unsavory aspects about the U.S. as a nation.  For example, one willing to violate Nuremberg Article VI to actually launch a pre-emptive war by invasion as the Nazis did when they invaded Poland. The rich humor of it all is that at the time the Bushies actually compared Saddam to Hitler! Never mind that Saddam was the one being pounded by the most devastating shock and awe attack since the Blitzkrieg launched by Hitler on Poland in 1939.

But this sort of human evil had been strenuously reasoned and formally justified by Bushie Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney! In addition, the U.S. corporate media acted as a willing accomplice, fully complicit in spreading the hysteria that led to the Iraq invasion on March 15, 2003.  Hence each and every one of these actors, agents share blame in manifesting human evil, including the devastating costs exacted on Iraqi civilians.

 

Far from malignant human evil emerging without rationality or reason, it instead erupted as if from multiple cancerous cells becoming malignant. We the citizens also played along by being cowed, afraid to speak out lest we be deemed unpatriotic or even terrorist sympathizers.  Many of us also allowed ourselves to be too uninformed, even ignorant of the issues, thereby allowing ourselves to be played. Susan Jacoby, for example, references “two thirds of us can’t find Iraq on a map and many members of Congress don’t know a Shiite from a Sunni[2]”  In a nutshell, too many Americans have “become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions."

 

This is tragic, because if Americans can’t or won’t exercise their minds to think critically, especially concerning our national history and consequences of our actions, then we stand to be led into more reckless wars. This is why Obama's rhetoric that this proposed strike will be "limited" is bollocks. What if, after his "2- day" strike,  another nerve gas attack happens a month later and kills more than 1,429? What then? Obviously, having gone in once under this 'humanitarian" pretext, Obama will have to go in again... and again.....and again! There will be no end especially as he has no intentions of actually removing Assad (which itself would be as reckless as what we did with Saddam).

 

Enough "red lines". Remember one thing and one only: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

 

Hackneyed, but as true as ever. Let us have no more rational evil expedited with the best intentions! Under Obama, or anyone else.
 

 See also: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/1934

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1] We now know an Iraqi (codename ‘curveball’) made the whole WMD baloney up in order to trigger regime change to replace Saddam, oblivious to the human costs.

2] Jacoby, op. cit., 310.

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