NEW ORLEANS -- It's not as if the U.S. isn't sufficiently anti-intellectual (see the Climate-gate "scandal", e.g.), but we have been led into three consecutive neo-imperial expeditions since the 1950s, and the trumpets for each one have been blown by the nation's national defense intellectuals -- what David Halberstam called, in his history of the Vietnam adventure, "the best and the brightest".
The neocon think-tankers who clustered in D.C. in the late '90s and began banging the drum for an invasion of Iraq were, aside from their professed ideology, not that different from the "tough-minded liberals" who pushed Kennedy, and then LBJ, into the rice paddies and jungles of Southeast Asia. In this Saturday's edition of the The Guardian Indian writer Pankaj Mishra gives this notion its clearest, and most frightening twist.
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Wars do not start themselves, relying instead on "think tanks" comprised mainly of individuals with all manner of selfish interests. Justification of wars, including fabrication of WMDs isn't a big deal in the light of such.
Human selfishness is the true cause of all conflict. The harder route is one of reconciliation but that is not as spectacular as fighting. Is this why Wrestling, contact sports or action movies are the bigger drawers of money?
Who will benefit from war? The vulgus? God forbid because bankers and the moneyed control the means of producing arms. What will they eat with their descendants? There is truly nothing new under the sun. There is nothing that's there today that hasn't been seen in some form before.
Stop all war and devote those resources to the betterment of man. This won't happen of course but the challenge to all war mongers remains.
Your academic provincialism is precisely what gives well preserved ammo to those who scoff at not only your point, but your right to hold it, as well. For those of us who know better, and are willing to protest, on objective grounds, the wars now fought, the effort is crippled as we find ourselves forced to fight rear guard actions against revisionists like you. Your point, as well taken as it might be, is sadly compromised by your lack of historical perspective.
Whether it's a peasant in a rice paddy, a migrant worker picking tomatoes, or a kid going to an inner city public school, politicians always have to prove how "tough" they are by being "tough" toward people who lack the ability to properly defend themselves.
I'd say the Kennedys did a bad job of resisting the war drums from the military industrial complex, and that's how it always goes. But you are right in that the far right are always willful participants in any kind of hatemongering action. Liberals understand we don't "defend" the nation by murdering civilans halfway around the world.
The need for Democrats to prove themselves "tough on national security" is at least as dangerous as the natural bent to that kind of foreign policy from guys like Bush and Cheney.
Bottom line, Eisenhower was a prophet, and these wars are about the needs of industry.
It's pretty grim, however, because it doesn't shed much hope for a bright new day when we can all live in peace. Not when everyone, even the purest, most morally righteous individuals are seen as the most complicit.
Perhaps a first step for at least a national understanding would be to not assume that those we believe oppose our political beliefs have an evil agenda. That's a tall order put out by our forefathers. Do we have that kind of strength? If we can muster it, perhaps we could as a country add to our already impressive unity.
Calm discussion - based on fact, rather than rumor might afford better results, both for our nation and our own souls.
Souls rarely benefit from ignorance or hopelessness.
As someone else who lived through that earlier era, I was horrified to watch as the GOPers lied us into two more land wars in Asia. It is as if they had slept through the last 70 years of international history, and now had to learn their lessons the hard way, all over again.
What I find equally distressing is the way the American people have allowed themselves to fall victim all over again to the lying and the deceptions, designed to get us to invade foreign countries, the way we did back half a century ago.
Best and Brightest??? My guess is that this is the name they gave to themselves. I don't know how Halberstam came up with the title for his book. In any event, fundamentally they were government employees close to the White House and the highest levels of power who were all-to-familiar bureaucrats and members of groupthink. Like the poor, these we will always have with us.
appointing G W Bush as pres.
Put a cap on it now.
Unfortunately, the war machine was still there.