War Is A Lie by Swanson David

Author:Swanson, David [Swanson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
ISBN: 9780983083009
Publisher: David Swanson
Published: 2010-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Are These People Crazy?

As we saw in Chapter Two, war makers debate what purpose the public should be told a war is serving. But they also debate what purpose to tell themselves a war is serving. According to Pentagon historians, by June 26, 1966, “the strategy was finished,” for Vietnam, “and the debate from then on centered on how much force and to what end.”183 To what end? An excellent question. This was an internal debate that assumed the war would go forward and that sought to settle on a reason why. Picking a reason to tell the public was a separate step beyond that one.

President George W. Bush at times suggested that the War on Iraq was revenge for Saddam Hussein’s alleged (and likely fictitious) role in an assassination attempt against Bush’s father,184 and at other times Bush the Lesser revealed that God had told him what to do.185 After bombing Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson supposedly gloated “I didn’t just screw Ho Chi Minh, I cut his pecker off.” Bill Clinton in 1993, according to George Stephanopoulos, remarked about Somalia:

“We’re not inflicting pain on these fuckers. When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.”186

In May 2003, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS that the purpose of the Iraq war was to send U.S. troops door-to-door in Iraq to say “Suck on this.”

Are these people serious, crazy, obsessed with their penises, or drugged? The answers seem to be: yes, yes, of course, and they’ve all drunk alcohol as needed. During the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon told his aide Bob Haldeman that he would force the Vietnamese to surrender by acting crazy (this while successfully running for president, whatever that may say of our electorate):

“[The North Vietnamese will] believe any threat of force that Nixon makes, because it’s Nixon…. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.”187

One of Nixon ’s madman ideas was to drop nukes, but another was saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. Whether he’d been pretending to be crazy or not, Nixon actually did this, dropping 36 thousand tons on two cities in 12 days before agreeing to the same terms that had been offered prior to that fit of mass murder. If there was a point to this, it may have been the same one that later motivated “surge” escalations in Iraq and Afghanistan — the desire to look tough before leaving, thus transforming defeat into a vague claim of having “finished the job.” But maybe there was no point.

In chapter five we looked at the irrationality of violence outside of wars. Can the making of wars perhaps be equally irrational? Just as someone may rob a store because they need food but also be

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