August 28, 2013
Spoleto, Italy
There’s a common expression that military commanders like to use in times like this– ‘you can’t be a little bit pregnant.’
Translation: you either go to war, or you don’t. You can’t halfway go to war. You can’t ‘sort of’ go to war.
And if you do, it’d better be for a damn good reason.
This is one of the reasons why, in the United States, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution REQUIRING that the Commander-in-Chief to seek Congressional approval before declaring war.
The idea was to prevent frivolous military conflict– to keep the President from having royal powers to invade foreign lands and wage war in his sole discretion.
Early settlers in the colonies had experienced enough of this during the Seven Years’ War, which had wiped 350,000 people off the face of the earth across five continents just prior to the American Revolution.
The Founding Fathers saw the absurdity in awarding a single individual with such extreme power to drag his entire nation into war. So they carefully structured limitations in the Constitution.
Such provisions have long since been ignored in the Land of the Free. And nearly every conflict fought has been utterly futile.
I remember how devastated I felt as a young intelligence officer sitting in the Kuwaiti desert in early 2003 watching Colin Powell make the case to the United Nations for the invasion of Iraq.
Most of the intelligence community at the time knew the case for war was totally bogus. And I remember my colleagues and I looking at each other asking, “What WMDs are these people talking about??”
It was obvious there was a hidden agenda very high up in the administration.
Ten years later, the body count from the conflict exceeds 100,000 military and civilian casualties. Yet Iraq is a ‘free country’. And China is reaping the benefits, buying nearly half the oil that Iraq produces at nearly 1.5 million barrels per day.
Mission Accomplished.
Now Barack Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate wants to bring the same freedom to Syria.
Nevermind that there are dozens of places in the world where genocidal dictators are exterminating their own citizens.
And nevermind that Mr. Obama and his team are working tirelessly to dismantle every vestige of personal and economic liberty in the Land of the Free.
No, the community organizer-in-chief is bringing his extensive military experience and liberty street cred to bear on Syria, just to prove that he’s a man of his word.
It’s like some idiot teenager who just got double-dog-dared into jumping off a bridge. So now Mr. Obama is going to war.
But only ‘sort of’. He’ll drop bombs and lob missiles. But no bullets. He’ll use drones and ‘surgical’ air strikes (because those never hit schools and hospitals). But no ground troops.
And of course, he has to invade Cyprus first (the staging ground for the air strikes) in order to NOT invade Syria.
But don’t pay attention to those details. MiniTruth just wants you to unquestioningly believe their 1984 DoubleThink logic.
That’s why wars these days are no longer commanded by generals. Or even politicians. These days it’s all poll-tested taglines. Think tank-approved strategies. Steering committees and focus groups to set policy.
It’s a clever marketing con job to ensure that people remain emotionally engaged in the war, but scared enough for their anger to be placated, and distracted enough to not notice the steady advance of the police state back home… or the rapid unraveling of the global financial system.
