That’s the war to start war, you understand, because the Weekly Standard thinks we’re just not killing enough people. The “Editors”, meaning Bad Boy Billy Kristol, demand that we “Stop Calling Russia a Competitor”! You know what Russia does? “Putin’s government invades neighboring states, murders its opponents with impunity on foreign soil, undermines the elections in Western democracies, perpetrates cyberwarfare against America and its allies, and supports malign governments around the world with both money and expertise.”
Well, the U.S. doesn’t “invade neighboring states”, but we do invade non-neighboring ones, a lot, with far more bloodshed than Russia has occasioned, and Bill and friends wish we would invade more. The U.S. already has “special forces” (i.e., hit men) operating in 143 countries, but the Weekly Standard thinks our body count is way too low. More war! More war! More war!
The real point of all this meretricious nonsense (one might even call it malign) is that Bill et al. are afraid, despite the fact that the Trump Administration is packed to the gills with the most brutal gang of right-wing neocon plug-uglies ever assembled in one spot, and despite the fact that the Trump Administration has increased our already bloated defense budget by $133 billion since taking office less than two years ago even while Russia’s total defense spending has remained frozen over the same period at less than $43 billion a year.
Why are they afraid? What could they possibly be afraid of? That Trump is all show and no go. That the United States will unconsciously “retreat” from the world—that is to say, will retreat from the notion that the U.S. has to dominate everything—which, for Bill and his pals, means that the U.S. will retreat from the Bush Administration’s disastrous policy of “running” the Middle East, which we disastrously failed to do, both with the Bush Administration’s policy of outright military intervention and the Obama Administration’s “lead from behind” policy of hidden intervention—“unbelievably small”, as then Secretary of State John Kerry once unbelievably promised, regarding his “plans” for “solving” the Syrian civil war, which incidentally remains unsolved, despite continuing, not so tiny U.S. intervention. The Weekly Standard fears that we will unconsciously retreat from a policy we have no reason to pursue.
Plumbers have a saying: “Shit don’t flow uphill unless it’s pumped.” Bill and his buddies are pumping shit, pumping the notion that the U.S. has to assume a role that it has no need to assume, that it has to effectively rule the world, and not to protect itself, but rather to protect Israel, for, once again, that is the eye of all this sound and fury, all of this attempt to mislead the American people to waste their own resources, and lay waste to the world, to protect Israel, which is quite capable of protecting itself. They may not know it—they may not want to know it—but Bill and friends are pursuing, not the safety of Israel, but the sense of purpose that defending Israel has given their lives. The neocons have become a solution in search of a problem. If Israel is safe, why are we important? Who will listen to our speeches? Who will give us money? Grave questions indeed.
Afterwords
Is Vladimir Putin a soulless authoritarian potentate whose will to power is in fact corrupting the country he professes to love? Yes. Is he a significant danger to the U.S.? No.
