"Suck on This Again"— aka The Ledeen Doctrine Redux
by tristero
A coda to Digby's earlier post about Lindsey Graham wanting to put "points on the board" by invading Venezuela which will somehow show other countries we mean bizness:
This kind of loony, cynical thinking has a looooong history in America. And it is the height of dangerous, murderous stupidity.
Here are some samples of the same mindset from the Bush/Iraq War:
Andrew Card, Bush's White House Chief of Staff:
'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products [i.e., the invasion of a country for no legitimate reason] in August.'
NY Times Columnist Thomas Friedman:
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
...
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
...
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
And of course, there's Michael Ledeen, as big a damn fool as ever lived:
[E]very ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
And how did Bush/Iraq work out?
It turned out to be the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, with more than 4,500 Americans dead, 32,000 wounded, trillions of dollars spent and a region thrown into chaos with the rise of the Islamic State just one of the eventual consequences, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died.
And that's what will happen again if Graham gets his way.
Fuck points on the board. Let's get these crazy people out of our public lives.