Don't Call it War

Nothing brings the country together like deciding we need to go overseas and kill some people. Chelsea Manning urges that we should exercise the discipline to let ISIS self-destruct.  But sanity is not a popular position in Congress.

Patrick Smith sees the incredible mess we have made in the Middle East as hastening the decline of the American empire.

There is next to no chance that Washington will “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, to take Obama’s noted words for the mission. There is next to every chance that, as in Afghanistan and during Iraq Wars I and II, the military presence will win ISIS support because they speak for the perfectly well-grounded anti-Western resentment that spreads wide and deep across the Middle East.

It's an ugly situation largely of our own making.  It's as if Obama has no power to seek out any other path.  Hope fades.  And the discouragement over the fact that nothing ever really changes easily drives people, maybe especially younger people, away from the political engagement we desperately need.

White House attorneys ... can advance flimsy legal arguments for Iraq War III, but taking Americans into war without declaring one, without calling it one, without congressional approval and without public consent is illegal by any constitutional interpretation not intended to obfuscate. For Americans, this is as significant as the violence that is now to be inflicted in their names on innocent civilians in the Middle East.

Since we can no longer speak plainly of what we are doing, we export it from the language to the land — vast now — of the unsayable. To me this is an unmistakable expression of the burden of silent shame and a vaguely focused depression many, many Americans feel in the face of what is done in their names, even as they cannot articulate it.

A certain faith is required — a faith that something will follow this time, something one can assist in bringing forth. Ray McGovern, the honorable veteran of the CIA now an active opponent of our corrupted political culture, put it this way in a speech Alternative Radio recorded last autumn: We shift attention from the flooding rains to the building of arks.