Waking Up from the GWOT
It’s still a long way away, but Digby casts a glance at a time beyond this institutional enemy-of-convenience that the neocon military-industrial complex has constructed:
… I am not sanguine that we can put this genie back in the bottle. The right will go crazy at the prospect that someone might question whether we are really “at war.” They are so emotionally invested in the idea that they cannot give it up. Indeed, the right is defined by its relationship to the boogeyman, whether communism or terrorism or some other kind of ism (negroism? immigrantism?) They will fight very, very hard to keep this construct going in the most literal sense. And they will probably win in the short term.
But it is long past time for people to start the public counter argument, which has the benefit of appealing to common sense. Many Americans are emerging from the relentless hail of propaganda that overtook the nation after the traumatic events of 9/11. Iraq confused people for a while, but that confusion is leaving in its wake a rather startling clarity: the “war” as the governmehnt defines it is bullshit. It will take a while for this common sense to become conventional wisdom, but it certainly won’t happen if nobody is willing to say it out loud.
…
But there is no war on terrorism. The nation is less secure because of this false construct. We are spending money we need not spend, making enemies we need not make and wasting lives we need not waste in the name of something that doesn’t exist. That is as politically incorrect a statement as can be made in America today. But it’s true.
…
And I suspect, too, that I will be long in my grave before the “war on terrorism” is a thing of the past. It was a terrible accident of history that September 11th happened when the lunatic neocon cabal was in power. Nothing could have been worse. It was more damaging than the attacks themselves. We’ll be dealing with the fall out from that strange happenstance for a generation.
A generation at least. There are serious long-term implications of the destruction of American political traditions that has been pursued in the last five (or twenty-five) years. It’s been a long, long time since leg-warmers and the Walkman, and we’re still dealing with the “legacy” of Ronald Reagan. How many hundreds of billions of dollars have been passed up the socio-economic ladder in the name of tax “relief” and terror? (Generations of trust-fund babies yet-to-be will have an even cushier life, thanks to these few years of bold leadership. Not that trust-fund kids are necessarily to blame; some of my best friends are trust-fund kids. But the generational fleecing has been swift and thorough.) Meanwhile, today, tens of millions of children are still uninsured, under-nourished and poorly educated. The ghost of these years will haunt the poor in this country and around the world for decades. And mostly, they’ll never know it.
