With the escalation ladder, you only go up or down. There is no side to side.
There is a broader level of commercial greed in the context of the Ukraine War that cannot be dismissed or ignored.
“Sometimes, war is sold like a consumer product, where there’s a lot of hype and a lot of hope,” said Bill Astore, a retired U.S. Air Force veteran and a senior fellow with the Eisenhower Media Network. “That is contrary to the reality we often see.”
Matt Hoh as Associate Director was instrumental in getting this letter into the Times
The perception is that things are out of control.
It was, of course, not to be and today we once again find ourselves on an increasingly apocalyptic planet. To quote Pink Floyd, the child is grown and the dream is gone. All too sadly, Americans have become comfortably numb to the looming threat of a nuclear Armageddon. And yet the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock continues to tick ever closer to midnight precisely because we persist in building and deploying ever more nuclear weapons with no significant thought to either the cost or the consequences.
Millions of Iraqis have been displaced.
It’s important to understand how all of this comes together.
Twenty years on, listening to panels bringing together American and Iraqi perspectives of the 2003 war demonstrated that there remain, in emerging American narratives at least, two very different Iraq wars.
Desolation is what occurred.