View original postAs far as the ostensible premise of the article, it's rather shallow given the level of expertise and inside access of the authors. I literally taught that perspective on most of those events in my high school history classes. I notice there's no mention of the more recent and relevant in the average reader's mind, efforts to delude the US into believing they had a national security interest in either World War. The reason I don't buy into the "FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance" conspiracy theories, was because I read a progressive Democrat's account of the set-up false flag operation being prepared in late November 1941, sending an under-manned, obsolete vessel to scout Japanese-occupied waters, but being given just enough armaments to technically be classified as a type of warship the general public would believe was a significant asset, whose loss would consist of a major provocation, when in fact, the Japanese sailors who moved against, would probably mistake it for a trespassing civilian craft or possible espionage vessel.

View original postOne of the more tedious arguments by left-wing fellow travelers concerning the Iraq War was "Bush lied, kids died," which in addition to being an emotional argument was both untrue and pointless. It's easier to drum up hate if you can put a face to it, so they were more interested in tarring the enemy they believed "stole" the election, than making a case on merit. Bush did not lie about the nukes. He merely stated that it was believed by intelligence agencies that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the source of the "they didn't argued" was itself suspect, the very dubiously credentially Joseph Wilson. And then questioning those credentials was turned into a charge of the administration burning undercover CIA agents, where the special investigator was only able to nail anyone on an even more dubious perjury charge, because two parties' recollection of a conversation differed.

View original postAll of which served the purpose of neatly deflecting attention away from the point that even if Saddam Hussein sent someone to Nigeria to buy uranium, that's not a valid casus belli! Stalin, Brezhnev & Andropov had nuclear weapons, Mao had nukes, Pakistan has nukes. Still no nuclear war. The only nation that is demonstrably untrustworthy with nuclear weapons is the United States. If Saddam got nukes, the people most worried would be the left's eternal bete noir in the Middle East (a point made very thoroughly in an article you yourself posted three years ago), Israel, and the current boogeyman, Iran. Wouldn't be nice if the Iranian nuclear program was Saddam's headache instead of ours? Note that even if nuclear weapons, the aggressively war-mongering Zionist colonialist state of Israel has not used them to conquer its neighbors. Note that despite sympathies for various Islamic terrorists, Pakistan has not shared its arsenal with such parties. If Mutually Assured Destruction can keep ideological fanatics and paranoid Holocaust whiners in check, it would probably be even more effective on a degenerate who seemed more interested in living the good life than imposing Sharia law or exporting revolution.

View original postBut instead, people chose to personally attack Bush, because it's more satisfying to call him a liar, than stand by a principle and make the argument about the issues. Heaven forbid, he might have been forced to change his mind and then what names would they be allowed to call him? So in order to gratify their baser political impulses, many, including, apparently, the authors of this article, chose to tacitly concede his standard of belligerence, and instead fight on the grounds of whether or not Bush war correct about whether the line had been crossed. Then, when someone in the administration exasperatedly pointed out a flaw in Wilson's credibility, rather than address the point that his personal failure to find proof of the administration's claims does not constitute proof AGAINST said claims, by pointing out that he got the job because his wife worked at the CIA, there was a much better stick to beat the administration with. Calling Bush a liar about Saddam Hussein wanting nukes wasn't getting a lot of traction, because, really, it sounds like the kind of thing Saddam would do, and people still wanted blood for 9/11. So instead we pivot to the story that Bush betrayed one of our noble covert warriors, risking life and liberty deep behind enemy lines! They got so hung up on that point that they even made a bullshit movie about it, starring an Australian who has subsequently taken an uncredited role in another gratuitous cinematic attack on the administration, a decade too late. Whether or not Valerie Plame's job was a vital secret, and whether or not officials did something wrong in mentioning that she was a CIA employee HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WAR.

View original postThis is why war happens, because even people who are opposed to it, are more invested in their political agendas than a principled stand on an issue, which might even, heaven forbid, force them to give credibility to ideological adversaries who share their stance on that issue. The left hated Pat Buchanan and the traditional, moral-based conservatives even more than they did Bush, so they had zero interest in letting them have a mike, and instead went with "Bush lied, kids died". Similar things happened with the administration of Richard Nixon, where the media's hatred of Nixon was so visceral that it might as well have been a false flag operation, and allowed him to run an awful lot of his agenda through against the principled opposition of many on the right. Lyndon Johnson said about one of Nixon's policies, now forgotten by mainstream history, "If I had tried the same thing, I'd have been lynched, and Richard Nixon would have been holding the rope."

View original postThe media and the opposition in government is critical to the warmongering process. They no longer form any sort of effective check, because they are part of the so-called Blob. They are not obstacles, they are part of the landscape in which elected officials have become accustomed to manuever. Or the Deep State. Trump has been doing a lot of warmongering for someone who ran on a much saner foreign policy. But he's not alone. Obama never closed down Gitmo, and went from pledges to do so, and to be the most transparent administration ever, to escalating the drone-strike program. Bush's campaign quoted John Quincy Adams' famously obsolete claim that American does not go abroad looking for monsters to deploy. His predecessor, a Vietnam-era peace advocate, set a then-record for deployments of US troops and his father's "kinder,gentler America" barged into Iraq and Kuwait, celebrating the advanced weaponry and the havoc it wreaked.

View original postThey were able to do all this, because the media, whether opposing or adoring a politician, is easily manipulated or out-manuevered. The bureaucracy is more interested in strengthening their own turf than serving their country and most of the members of both political parties are colleagues more interested in getting along and making their work-days as easy as possible. The administrations understand why some of them have to make a lot of noise, and they figure that it. In turn, others of them can be counted on to vote the right way when it's really important, and they get taken care of, too. War is in the interests of all these parties, the elected officials, the media and the bureaucracy. Nothing will ever change that, aside from stripping the power to make war away from the government, or finding someway to break up the conglomeration that makes politics a profession, with people like the authors of the article moving between the bureaucracy, media and elected office, along with stops in the offices of their corporate cronies or the so-called "think tanks" which are effectively an overflow mechanism, to keep good little soldiers employed and in the game when they happen to be the ones without a chair when the music stops.