Posted by olvlzl.
A story on the BBC website puts it this way:
“Why did Condoleezza Rice come to Israel and the West Bank earlier this week?
By all accounts, the US secretary of state had no fresh ideas to offer to revive what used to be called the Middle East peace process.”
“No fresh ideas”, is a polite description considering the article is about how Condi is serving up warmed over “peace plans” lines, the kind that didn’t go anywhere on her roadmap to nowhere the last time they wanted to sell a war. Her diplomacy has all the retro-style of platforms and elephant pants topped by a leisure suit jacket. In the most used idea of all times, Kissinger is reselling his invasion of Cambodia, well, they don’t call it that but that’s what it is. And we all know how well that worked the last time. Bush II has bought out the entire stock, mothballs and all.
There should be better ways of keeping the Republican Party from endless foreign adventures and wars of conquest than destroying the American military through these insane wars. Most importantly because a lot of people get killed, non-Americans mostly but also Americans. Since our elites have an infinite ability to overlook mountains of corpses as long as they don’t contain rich white people, that’s not how this will be argued in the media.
I’m all for the United States going back to being a democratic republic but this is the worst way to destroy the imperial ambitions of the plutocrats. Vietnam, in which they pretty much got their way until it began to destroy the United States, was a warning gone unheard.
Under Reagan and Bush I the cry was that the “country had to get over Vietnam syndrome”, a disease which was defined as a reluctance to use military force brought on by the defeat in that war*. The real disease wasn’t defeatism it was the idiotic imperialism that caused the war in the first place. The expenditure of lives in a criminal and amazingly foolish war of conquest and the enormous financial cost to the country were the real causes of weakness. When you spend lots of lives and money you tend to weaken your position. The American People are not an endless expense account. The reluctance to continue destroying the country over the fantasies of academic crackpots and grasping imperialists wasn’t an illness, it was a return to sanity. Unfortunately the remission didn’t even last a decade.
If they get their war in Iran, which they will if Republicans win the election next month, they will destroy the country, The United States and perhaps Iran as well. The aftermath of the Bush II years will make the late 70s look like a golden age. Not the disco and nostalgia junk, that was the plutocrats way of dumbing down the country to prepare the way for Reagan, the malaise that took hold during the Ford and then Carter years. The country will be lucky if its just that sort of low-grade fever-depression feeling this time. I’ll bet it’s a lot more like the depression and Pearl Harbor rolled into one.
Just now I’m not going to get into what it does to how the rest of the world feels about the United States after six years of Bush II. Not just now. They won’t allow us to act this way forever.
* The lie that it was “not fought hard enough”, assiduously sold through a string of fascist-chic and action movies during the 80s and 90s is one of the bigger lies ever sold. There is no one spouting that argument who dosen’t base their argument on something like what they could have heard in one of these fascist-chic sources instead of fact so don’t bother arguing with them anymore. Just keep asserting the truth. Leftists don’t just assert what they know to be true based on facts nearly often enough. Facts don’t matter to conservatives, just repetition.
About the title, from the famous question asked about Richard Nixon, "Would you buy a used war from this man" . In looking for the classic use of the line I found out that David Horowitz, then a draft-age, anti-Vietnam war, draft-card burning, would be student leader, now a neo-con retro, retred, in no danger of deployment has a right little pout about the question in his Daddy-Warbucks funded vainty mag. No link, I don't link to finks.