“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.”
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.
In short, the U.S. view of the Iraq War remains insular and narcissistic. The focus is on what U.S. troops may have gotten wrong, and how the military could perform better in the future.
There are about ten thousand nuclear weapons…in this world. It would only take about 1% of those to kill billions.
Don’t look for those within this nightmarish system to change it, not when our elected representatives are part of the very military-industrial complex that sustains this MADness.