Do we see any pattern at all folks?
Reporting says the US is finally pulling out of Iraq. How many decades have we been involved there? How much damage has been done by decisions made with poor judgement? And how much actual good has been achieved by our actions?
We were sold a bill of goods to convince us that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. Even though the terroists that wreaked havoc on our society and psyche were mostly from Saudi Arabia. A country that we are now bosom buddies with…because of mutual self-interest. So that tells you how authentic patriotic fervor in the pursuit of ‘revenge’ actually is.
We were sold a bill of goods by people we trusted. We (mostly) believed them when they told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That we needed to eject Saddam because he was going to nuke us. It was all tied up into a tidy little package for public consumption.
And it was total BS based on the long-held fever dream that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would lead to stability in the region. And opportunities for the US to assert more power.
So what do we have today? The same presidential hubris. The same over-weening certainty that we can realign societies to suit our own goals. That all America has to do is show up and nations will bend.
Instead, we seem stuck in yet another endless war started, and enabled, by a Republican administration.
Trump invaded Iran with hubris. Now he can’t find a way out. And Iran has all the cards he keeps telling us he has.
But now, predictably, what do we get to listen to? Yesterday on social media, Trump took credit to himself for ending the US engagement in Iraq. And actually complained that it was “very bad decision-making that got us involved in this quagmire in the first place.”
And yet the United States is entering its eighth month of a war on Iran that Trump apparently began with the same blindspot mentality George W. Bush carried into the war in Iraq.
But no worries.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico. He announced he had transformed the military by enforcing the idea of “[n]o fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals. Just warriors.”
“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”
These patriotic cowboys with T-testing never seem to realize they might actually be the problem. And rarely the solution.
But they are oh-so-good at chest-thumping aren’t they?
Too bad they can’t actually finish what they always start.
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