War on Mood Elevators

I am posting here portions of a post I made on inthesetimes regarding a poll on the Lieberman-Lamont primary.

I was impressed with the quality of comments made in response to my initial post (see the post following this here on jbpeebles for those comments.) You may want to visit the inthesetimes.com site.

As background, it's important to understand that the Iraq War has become a political liability. Political nonconformists are taking considerable delight in the truth that just going along will take you over a cliff. The passivity with which Democrats and moderate Republicans have dealt with the Bush Administration is becoming a political problem as the militarist policies of the Administration are proving unmanageable and invariably unwinnable.

The lesson here is clearly to question the motives of the President before buying into any policy agenda. Where questionable facts are spread, ask questions. The media failed to do this, and the consequence has been an unnecessary war. Congress has also failed; by unconditionally accomodating the President's every whim, they've made us all unwilling co-conspirators in a failed strategy to win Iraq from the "terrorists."

As Bush's mood-elevated ramblings begin to sound more and more like the hollow rhetoric some of us have heard from the start, realists are joining moderates in opposing the senseless, open-ended land wars in Asia.

The blind obedience goes back to Vietnam. Rush and the Right-wing hate mongers blame our failure there on the media. By crushing antiwar dissent, the storyline goes, we could have perpetuated the conflict long enough to win.

Perhaps starting a war and continuing it indefinitely is a way that the Right can show us how to win, as they would have without the liberal press telling Americans that we were losing. Iraq is how the sour taste of defeat in Vietnam can be replaced by the sweetness of victory. Never mind the reality that the Iraqis will hate us in the future for our "liberation", or that broadening anti-US sentiment will make any other goals we have for the region unachievable.

The Right isn't about winning on the battlefield, they want to score political points domestically. So for those wanting to believe the best, the eternal optimists, staying the course makes sense (assuming of course that these people aren't able to objectively evaluate the chance of "victory.") Keep popping the mood elevators, and they won't even notice the body bags coming back, or how little the Iraqis can achieve without us--read Zulus and no redcoats.

Those catastrophic issues may be petty inconsistencies in the petty minds of war supporters, but they do dictate outcomes back here on Earth. Simply purging the depressing truths isn't enough to alter reality, as a matter of fact ignoring the facts necessitates the continued popping of anti-depressants to prop up a state of mind these fantasists must preserve to reconcile the world to their worldview.

So let the Presidents ramble on about victory over the terrorists, taking as long as it may. He will always have a cadre behind him, simply because in our depressing world, accepting that we cannot always win or have our way requires accepting just how powerless we really are (yes even the Untied States can't have everything it wants). Lacking control over our lives will invariably lead to depression, so why be depressed? When the facts and realities of the truth have caught up to the consequences of carefully spun, long-term truth denial, Bush and his followers will be long gone, or so they think. The sober people will be left to clean up their mess.

There are fortunately bastions of truth out there for those who see their world through the lense of reality, not some some rose colored, anti-depressant-laced looking glass. Back to my 2nd post about Lamont-Leiberman on inthesetimes [I am TruthTelR there]:

...So many people who buy into the War Party's racism have no contact with Muslims at all. The consequence are trumped up charges born of paranoia, as we saw with the young men from Dearborn buying phones (charges subsequently dropped.)

The mantle of fear depends on a state of ignorance. If people realized there is no problem with Islam, just radicalism within Islam, we'd begin to solve the problems we have in the region. That radicalism feeds off of US support for Israel and the Gulf states (if anyone actually listened for the reasons Osama gave for hating us.)

There is some paranoia on the other side of the cultural and religious divide, but who could blame them? They have something we crave--oil. There's been systematic economic exploitation of the region by Western powers. And if we look at what the Israelis have done to Lebanon, largely with American weapons, wouldn't you be a little scared of getting Depleted Uranium dropped on your country? (And remember Lebanon is half Christian--which in itself proves that the Clash of Civilizations isn't about religion, although Shia areas were hit hardest by Israel.)

The militaristic approach is highly flawed at best. Educated and informed voters will invariably seek out more logical solutions to the problems we face with the Middle East. While the victor in the Senate race may be antiwar, unfort he will also be extremely sympathetic to the Israeli side, which will continue to slant our military and fiscal support towards that country. The absence of a less biased approach to our foreign policy in the region will ferment Islam militancy as we are caught supporting Israel and so-called "moderate" states who repress their populations.

End Post.

Media Angle
I think the failure of Americans to understand what is realy going on is a product of extreme pro-Israeli bias in the media. Slanted stories and censorship-by-omission are the consequences. As we saw in the run-up to Iraq, the press has become Bush's lapdog. So is it that big of a surprise that the press takes an anti-Arab stance? So many in the media have worked for Israel-centered organizations. Israel has lobbied long and hard to become the most influential nation in America. So of course the Israeli lobby takes advantage of its position in order to benefit the nation. As before Iraq, the MSM goes along.