Deja War

Incredibly, it’s happening again. As if Iraq never happened, as if the innumerable lessons from that national shame and continuing horror never happened. As if the ’06 election slapdown and clear annunciation of the people’s will never happened.

Incredibly, the same cast of chickenhawk fools and lazy legislators who brought us Iraq are now dragging the country into an even bigger pile of bushit. Incredibly, the media awaits their next sage utterances on the “progress” in Iraq and the need to bomb the hell out of Iran as if they had a shred of credibility remaining.

Incredibly, there’s nothing that we can do to stop it. Democrats either believe the war-think rhetoric about Iran’s evil intentions â€” why, someday they might be as aggressively violent as us! â€” or they see more Bush-Cheney-war as good election politics. In any case, Dems are desperate to avoid looking soft on terror, so how can they say no to the indiscriminate bombing of a bunch of Muslims, or Arabs, or whatever the hell they are over there?

But we live in an age where dialogue is dismissed and empathy is suspect. We prefer the illusion that we can dictate events through force. It hasnâ€™t worked well in Iraq. It hasnâ€™t worked well in Afghanistan. And it wonâ€™t work in Iran. But those who once tried to reach out and understand, who developed expertise to explain the world to us and ourselves to the world, no longer have a voice in the new imperial project. We are instead governed and informed by moral and intellectual trolls.