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> Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young p

> Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. And it’s true. Reminds me of the onion caption for a picture of a bomb “capable of creating 1,500 new terrorists in single blast.” Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? This politicians keep us turned on each other with petty, polarizing subjects while they keep doing what they’ve always done. I’m baffled. I hate it.

geofft 6y ago
Trump's position is, very roughly, "We should avoid war because it's bad for the economy." This is a fairly different take than the progressive "We should avoid war because killing innocents is bad" - in particular, once it's good for the economy (which it often is when you're not in a boondoggle), you're back to agreeing with Cheney. I won't deny that there's a meaningful difference between right-populism and neoconservatism, but as long as the progressive left remains true to its "bleeding heart" nature (for lack of a better term) for reasoning, I don't think that it's a problem to temporarily agree with parts of the right wing on conclusions. Be glad for the opportunity for bipartisan agreement, and keep advocating for what you believe instead of against what they believe. (... which goes a bit to the article's point: defining your party's goals as "we disagree with them" is great for attention and voter turnout but not necessarily for doing what's important to your worldview.)
- Natsu 6y ago
  Funny you say that because recent OCPW leaks have pointed out that the war some were once pushing in Syria over alleged gas attacks was false. It's always amazing how many wars start via a toxoplasma of rage based on false premises.
  - geofft 6y ago
    Sure. I think you'll find that the anti-war left remained anti-war. Just like Trump and Cheney represent pretty different strains of conservatism despite both being on the right, the anti-war left is a different strain of progressivism from Democratic leadership. Again - don't give in to the temptation of "the other side is bad." It's easy, it is often true because humans are bad in general, but it's not usually productive in accomplishing your goals, especially if there's a chance the other side shares those goals. If I had to pick an example of the weak but controversy-raising cases the article brings up (I don't actually find those super convincing, myself, tbh), "WikiLeaks has letters from a couple of scientists internally raising the possibility that a strike that was already fairly controversial may have been even less justified than claimed even though the opponents of the strike are happy to acknowledge that the target of the strike was morally in the wrong, so progressives are hypocrites" seems like exactly the sort of thing he's talking about.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      Then it's a good thing that I'm not making the claim "progressives are hypocrites" here and instead giving an example of how the toxoplasma of rage is misused for propaganda to start wars. There's a long history of parties manufacturing casus belli and it benefits the world to be aware of this so as not to support more wars.
  - mlang23 6y ago
    That is not surprising. It is called CIA.
  - gostsamo 6y ago
    This does not support your claim. Do you have something more recent? The report reached the following conclusions: • At approximately 6:00 on 24 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 16 persons. • At approximately 15:00 on 25 March 2017, a helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Hama airbase, dropped a cylinder on the Ltamenah hospital; the cylinder broke into the hospital through its roof, ruptured, and released chlorine, affecting at least 30 persons. • At approximately 6:00 on 30 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 60 persons. https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/04/opcw-releases-first-report-investigation-and-identification-team https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/04/opcw-releases...
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
"War for oil" wasn't entirely fair, but I do expect the consensus to change rapidly now that we're a net exporter and don't have to fear a repeat of the 1973 embargo.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  The war machine is much more profitable than oil at this point.
082349872349872 6y ago
When the british navy waived the rules, they mostly sailed. For the US navy to rule the waves requires oil.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Question for those who disliked the comment above: do you disagree that the US Navy largely runs on combustion engines; or do you think that Texas and Louisiana have enough seaborne export bandwidth to support a hot war, on their own, without KSA et. al.; or have I missed a possibility? (I haven't looked at USN tankers, in an asian context an important question would be: are they even Panamax? As far as the crude network is concerned, Alberta is more closely connected to Texas than California is. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elisabeth_Krausmann/publication/274656165/figure/fig7/AS:614298099392530@1523471488533/Map-of-the-US-crude-oil-and-refined-product-pipelines-API-2013.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elisabeth_Krausmann/pub... )
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I don't really believe that anyone disliked it for principled reasons, but I am a bit skeptical of relations with Saudi Arabia as a strategy for keeping Navy ships fueled in a hot war. Could we really expect uninterrupted trade from a country that's quite literally on the other side of the world?
zozbot234 6y ago
> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. After all, war and anti-war is surely one of the most consequential areas that presidents can directly influence; far more so than most government policy!
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. No, it wouldn't. Co-opting a political position is about rhetorical positioning and has no necessary relationship to substantive policy.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Of course much of politics is about rhetorical positioning, with only indirect "relationships to substantive policy". From this POV though, rhetorical positioning about war seems to do reasonably well at predicting how a president might influence "substantive" choices relating to war.
philwelch 6y ago
> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Okay I’m gonna quibble with this. If I had to compare Trump to any previous political figure, it would be Pat Buchanan, who was and is a paleoconservative. Paleoconservatives are anti-war in the old isolationist sense. Ron Paul popularized a more libertarian spin on paleoconservatism but Trump is steeped in it—to whatever degree he’s steeped in anything beyond his own narcissism—and the American right has a rich legacy of anti-war paleoconservatives who once thought maybe FDR was doing too much to provoke Germany and Japan. That just got set aside for about a half century after Pearl Harbor, but they’ve been there this whole time and after the controversies of GWB and his “neocon” advisors, paleocon ideas had a resurgence.
- notahacker 6y ago
  It's also the case that the anti-war right has had much more consistent anti-war positions than Trump, who might have used isolationist arguments to justify reducing US presence in the Middle East overall, but has also defended the notion of keeping troops there to secure oil, escalated with Iran and mooted military intervention in Latin America. The anti-war right wouldn't have appointed the likes of John Bolton to advise them on security.
  - philwelch 6y ago
    This is true.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Well, the old "isolationist" case for non-interventionism has always been in the service of "commerce with all nations", avoiding "entangling alliances" as far as practicable - so it's a bit difficult to differentiate it from either a "progressive left" or a "libertarian" POV. Intervention in WWI and WWII (in both instances, on the side of democracies) was rather broadly supported because the prospect of a world ruled by the philosophy of totalitarianism and military aggression was hardly attractive, even to quite a few "paleo" conservatives.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
ajuc 6y ago
> Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Your economy depends on USD being the world currency.
pjc50 6y ago
> why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Never mind oil, the problem with US foreign policy is that it's run by (a) people with links to the countries involved and (b) money. So policy about Cuba is dictated by those who fled the revolution and their children, regardless of what might be best now for US-Cuba relations. Policy is influenced in favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, those countries are mostly enemies of each other, so US foreign policy is confused and ineffective - apart from the one thing that Israel and Saudi Arabia can agree on, which is that Iran is Bad.

geofft 6y ago

Trump's position is, very roughly, "We should avoid war because it's bad for the economy." This is a fairly different take than the progressive "We should avoid war because killing innocents is bad" - in particular, once it's good for the economy (which it often is when you're not in a boondoggle), you're back to agreeing with Cheney. I won't deny that there's a meaningful difference between right-populism and neoconservatism, but as long as the progressive left remains true to its "bleeding heart" nature (for lack of a better term) for reasoning, I don't think that it's a problem to temporarily agree with parts of the right wing on conclusions. Be glad for the opportunity for bipartisan agreement, and keep advocating for what you believe instead of against what they believe. (... which goes a bit to the article's point: defining your party's goals as "we disagree with them" is great for attention and voter turnout but not necessarily for doing what's important to your worldview.)

Natsu 6y ago
Funny you say that because recent OCPW leaks have pointed out that the war some were once pushing in Syria over alleged gas attacks was false. It's always amazing how many wars start via a toxoplasma of rage based on false premises.
- geofft 6y ago
  Sure. I think you'll find that the anti-war left remained anti-war. Just like Trump and Cheney represent pretty different strains of conservatism despite both being on the right, the anti-war left is a different strain of progressivism from Democratic leadership. Again - don't give in to the temptation of "the other side is bad." It's easy, it is often true because humans are bad in general, but it's not usually productive in accomplishing your goals, especially if there's a chance the other side shares those goals. If I had to pick an example of the weak but controversy-raising cases the article brings up (I don't actually find those super convincing, myself, tbh), "WikiLeaks has letters from a couple of scientists internally raising the possibility that a strike that was already fairly controversial may have been even less justified than claimed even though the opponents of the strike are happy to acknowledge that the target of the strike was morally in the wrong, so progressives are hypocrites" seems like exactly the sort of thing he's talking about.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    Then it's a good thing that I'm not making the claim "progressives are hypocrites" here and instead giving an example of how the toxoplasma of rage is misused for propaganda to start wars. There's a long history of parties manufacturing casus belli and it benefits the world to be aware of this so as not to support more wars.
- mlang23 6y ago
  That is not surprising. It is called CIA.
- gostsamo 6y ago
  This does not support your claim. Do you have something more recent? The report reached the following conclusions: • At approximately 6:00 on 24 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 16 persons. • At approximately 15:00 on 25 March 2017, a helicopter of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Hama airbase, dropped a cylinder on the Ltamenah hospital; the cylinder broke into the hospital through its roof, ruptured, and released chlorine, affecting at least 30 persons. • At approximately 6:00 on 30 March 2017, an Su-22 military airplane belonging to the 50th Brigade of the 22nd Air Division of the Syrian Arab Air Force, departing from Shayrat airbase, dropped an M4000 aerial bomb containing sarin in southern Ltamenah, affecting at least 60 persons. https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/04/opcw-releases-first-report-investigation-and-identification-team https://www.opcw.org/media-centre/news/2020/04/opcw-releases...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

"War for oil" wasn't entirely fair, but I do expect the consensus to change rapidly now that we're a net exporter and don't have to fear a repeat of the 1973 embargo.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
The war machine is much more profitable than oil at this point.

082349872349872 6y ago

When the british navy waived the rules, they mostly sailed. For the US navy to rule the waves requires oil.

082349872349872 6y ago
Question for those who disliked the comment above: do you disagree that the US Navy largely runs on combustion engines; or do you think that Texas and Louisiana have enough seaborne export bandwidth to support a hot war, on their own, without KSA et. al.; or have I missed a possibility? (I haven't looked at USN tankers, in an asian context an important question would be: are they even Panamax? As far as the crude network is concerned, Alberta is more closely connected to Texas than California is. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elisabeth_Krausmann/publication/274656165/figure/fig7/AS:614298099392530@1523471488533/Map-of-the-US-crude-oil-and-refined-product-pipelines-API-2013.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elisabeth_Krausmann/pub... )
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I don't really believe that anyone disliked it for principled reasons, but I am a bit skeptical of relations with Saudi Arabia as a strategy for keeping Navy ships fueled in a hot war. Could we really expect uninterrupted trade from a country that's quite literally on the other side of the world?

zozbot234 6y ago

> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. After all, war and anti-war is surely one of the most consequential areas that presidents can directly influence; far more so than most government policy!

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Heck, if Trump managed to do that, it would seem to be reason enough to vote for him if you care about being anti-war - the progressive left be damned. No, it wouldn't. Co-opting a political position is about rhetorical positioning and has no necessary relationship to substantive policy.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Of course much of politics is about rhetorical positioning, with only indirect "relationships to substantive policy". From this POV though, rhetorical positioning about war seems to do reasonably well at predicting how a president might influence "substantive" choices relating to war.

philwelch 6y ago

> Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Okay I’m gonna quibble with this. If I had to compare Trump to any previous political figure, it would be Pat Buchanan, who was and is a paleoconservative. Paleoconservatives are anti-war in the old isolationist sense. Ron Paul popularized a more libertarian spin on paleoconservatism but Trump is steeped in it—to whatever degree he’s steeped in anything beyond his own narcissism—and the American right has a rich legacy of anti-war paleoconservatives who once thought maybe FDR was doing too much to provoke Germany and Japan. That just got set aside for about a half century after Pearl Harbor, but they’ve been there this whole time and after the controversies of GWB and his “neocon” advisors, paleocon ideas had a resurgence.

notahacker 6y ago
It's also the case that the anti-war right has had much more consistent anti-war positions than Trump, who might have used isolationist arguments to justify reducing US presence in the Middle East overall, but has also defended the notion of keeping troops there to secure oil, escalated with Iran and mooted military intervention in Latin America. The anti-war right wouldn't have appointed the likes of John Bolton to advise them on security.
- philwelch 6y ago
  This is true.
zozbot234 6y ago
Well, the old "isolationist" case for non-interventionism has always been in the service of "commerce with all nations", avoiding "entangling alliances" as far as practicable - so it's a bit difficult to differentiate it from either a "progressive left" or a "libertarian" POV. Intervention in WWI and WWII (in both instances, on the side of democracies) was rather broadly supported because the prospect of a world ruled by the philosophy of totalitarianism and military aggression was hardly attractive, even to quite a few "paleo" conservatives.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago

ajuc 6y ago

> Going on 20 years of forever war, why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Are we going to allow Trump to co-opt the anti-war position that’s traditionally been a tent pole for the progressive left? Your economy depends on USD being the world currency.

pjc50 6y ago

> why is there such strong bipartisan support for keeping Americans embroiled in the Middle East? Never mind oil, the problem with US foreign policy is that it's run by (a) people with links to the countries involved and (b) money. So policy about Cuba is dictated by those who fled the revolution and their children, regardless of what might be best now for US-Cuba relations. Policy is influenced in favour of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, those countries are mostly enemies of each other, so US foreign policy is confused and ineffective - apart from the one thing that Israel and Saudi Arabia can agree on, which is that Iran is Bad.