PeteFree.comDaniel Larison described the monkeys in the American wheelhouse
© 2017 Peter Free
11 December 2017
Paragraphs worth considering
Daniel Larison, a senior editor at The American Conservative, wrote that:
Our political culture tends to reward those that spin failure and usually punishes those that expose policy failures for what they are. Whenever someone acknowledges that a policy has failed, he is typically accused of being a “defeatist,” charged with having sympathy with our adversaries, and faulted for not having enough “resolve.”
There are also constituencies that have a vested interest in keeping failed policies going indefinitely, and the longer the failed policy has been in place the more influence the people that support it tend to have.
No one wants to be seen as the one who accepted what our government previously declared to be “unacceptable,” because no one wants to be opened up to the seemingly inevitable charge of “appeasement”. . . .
Instead of questioning whether punitive measures make sense and have the desired effect, it is much easier for our politicians and policymakers to pile on more sanctions and demands.
© 2017 Daniel Larison, Why Can’t the U.S. Abandon Failed Policies?, The American Conservative (11 December 2017) (excerpts)
True. Insofar as it goes.
But . . .
The moral? — It is gold-plated profitable to be an American warmonger
Warmonger critics tend to confuse issues.
Warmongers care about profit, not strategic sense. Strategic error (also known as stupidity) is less about ego and habit, than it is about keeping the Elites' flow of money and prestige coming in.
There is no downside to implementing bad policy. None of the war-boosting corporations and military-industrial protagonists pay in blood or maiming for their geopolitical mistakes or their abominable ethics. Personally meaningful costs nearly always fall to other people and other lands.
If we miss the wheelhouse monkeys' real motivations, we miss possibilities for strategic and moral correction.