Billmon scares the crap outta you:
"There was a time when I would have argued that the American people couldn't stomach that kind of butchery -- not for long anyway -- even if their political leaders were willing to inflict it. But now I'm not so sure. As a nation, we may be so desensitized to violence, and so inured to mechanized carnage on a grand scale, that we're psychologically capable of tolerating genocidal warfare against any one who can successfully be labeled a "terrorist." Or at least, a sizable enough fraction of the American public may be willing to tolerate it, or applaud it, to make the costs politically bearable."
"All along, I've had the sneaking suspicion that the choices in Iraq would ultimately boil down to mass butchery or defeat. But, as the above post indicates, over the years I've become progressively less certain what the ultimate decision would be -- and whether and when the American military would flinch from the implications of that choice."
2 comments:
Though I'm not exactly a courageous person when it comes to physical danger, there are many things I'm not afraid of. For example, I'm not afraid of dying in a terrorist attack at home; if that happens, my number was up anyway.
But there are plenty of things I am indeed afraid of. Billmon has put his finger on one of my greatest fears: that America will become the perpetrator of indiscriminate mass violence of the very sort it claims to be fighting to prevent. In my opinion, that is likely enough to be scary, and scary enough to make me weep for my country.
(Here's hoping I can post this. Blogger has presented me with the third commenting interface in as many days...)
I replied to this last night, but aptly, Blogger ate it.
We've been hijacked by neocons and they've let loose the worst of us: the rabid fanatics, the end of day-ers, the racists, the greedy corporatists, the warmongers, the bomb-them-back-to-the-stone-agers.
I never knew we had so many wannabe Nazis lurking or so many who never read their American history to recognize a McCarthy style witch hunt.
There are a lot of good people in the US and they just voted. Let's see if they pay more attention to what the next two years will bring with what we do in Iraq and in the rest of the world.
I hope Billmon is wrong.
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