John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MATT TAIBBI IN ZEROHEDGE
“Nothing unites our political class like the threat of ending our never-ending war ...”
A good piece, capturing some fundamental truth about America's power establishment.
In the early summary of the costs of the War on Terror, however, we find this:
"What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million?"
Well, it is far greater than that.
Just in Syria, at least that many have been killed.
The total for the invasion of Iraq, including all the aftershocks set off by it, is perhaps a million souls.
Then there's Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and several lesser spots.
I think a fair rough number is around 2 million.
And the number of hopeless refugees?
Many million. At least 3 million are in camps in Turkey. Germany took around a million. Terrible old Syria took about 2 million originally from Iraq.
No, the consequences of this American insanity are immense and will affect people for a couple of generations.
Meanwhile, the expenses-paid lunches in Washington likely swelled to record amounts.
It's called the abuse of power.
It's also called corruption, and Lord Acton had it so right with his words about power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
America's power establishment arrived at that last point in the dictum quite some years ago.
The amazing thing for me is how any American can believe his country would be free of these basic forces shaping human society?
Americans are somehow purer of heart? I do think there is some of that. Remember George Bush’s pathetic, blubbering Sunday School teacher words about America when some of the military’s war crimes came to light?
Take a bunch of privileged and ambitious insiders, give them hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on questionable projects with no well-defined purpose, give them all the secrecy they demand, give them no real accounting for their acts, and give them a blizzard of favorable propaganda to cover whatever they do.
What possible other results could you get?
The naivete of average Americans in just accepting this from their (bought-and-paid-for) politicians and never questioning what's in their (bought-and-paid-for) corporate press is astonishing.
Astonishing but a fact.
