Apparently the rabid defenders of the chickenhawk squads really think people take their embarassingly sad, whining, and pathetic attempt to analogize between launching and continuing wars with the work of the police and of firefighters.

But, but, why can't I scream that we need to launch more wars and blow up countries and then make the soldiers stay as long as I want and don't have to go myself?

Isn't that the same as you saying we should pass a law to make something a crime? Isn't it?

It's hard to think of quick and interesting analogies of what the right wing chickenhawk warmongers would be in policing or fire-fighting. You can come up with them, but they end up being paragraphs long and boring and by that point either you've gotten the poing or you never will.

Maybe it would be like insisting that to deal with organized crime in a major city, we denounce the "law enforcement" FBI approach of trying to investigate and prosecute as cowardly and pro-crime and anti-cop -- hey, the investigators had their chance but the organized criminals weren't fully cooperating so it's time to do what needs to be done ; so then we put the entire city's police force on 24/7 SWAT duty for the next 5 - 10 years and tell them to bust in and raid each and every home until they figure out who the criminals are and stop them.

Or maybe we start chanting about how it's not enough to fight the fires when they actually alight, that fire is the secret enemy that's just waiting to attack, that what we need to do is start a huge, huge fire in a neighboring city and by doing so we think we'll draw all the sleeper fires out of our city and into the neighboring conflagration so that we can fight the fire over there instead of fighting it over here.

The problem is that right wingers will think these sound like great ideas, and I really don't think we should encourage them with any more fantasies.

Which is why El Cid (I think it was him) and me asked you to read and comment on Chris Floyd's Post-Mortem America essay. Given that it came out at nearly the same time as your post concerning the fact that what America is has fundamentally changed -- that nearly every illegal action we abhor has now become the sanctioned law of the land, etc.

-- adnoto

This could just be my bad memory, but I don't think it was me, unless I had actually read and completely forgotten that Chris Floyd essay -- although having just read it I pretty much agree with its broad notions, although it really trails off at the "what to do" portion at the end.

But then, this week, the work load has been heavier so I rarely make it through Glenn's comments sections fully here recently.

Although the actual impact of various politicians, lobbies, corporations, voting blocs, etc., on particular policies is an empirical subject open to historical research, I agree with a number of the commenters here with regard to the role of what is referred to as "the Israeli lobby".

What has been fairly well established is that there is a coherent set of views and policies in U.S. foreign policy, led by a comparatively stable hawkish foreign policy establishment.

In my opinion, if the "Israeli" (that's in quotes, because liberal and dovish Israeli or Jewish perspectives don't count, only hawkish views) lobby truly, truly backed policies which seriously diverged from what was already desired by or believed in by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, then those lobbying efforts would fail.

Since about 1967 there has been a fairly rich synergy between hawkish Israeli 'foreign' policies (the occupation counts) and the generally hawkish U.S. consensus on foreign policy.

It wasn't accidental that Reagan could basically hire Israeli paramilitaries and suppliers to help his murderous death squad allies throughout Central America in the 1980s, because they all shared the same hawkish policy consensus. Israeli support allowed the U.S. to indirectly keep arming the Guatemalan genocidalists while Congress was somewhat reluctant, and of course neither nation's leaders really deeply cared one way or the other how many innocent Guatemalans or whoever were slaughtered by the U.S.' client state army forces, and of course Israeli suppliers made quite a bit of money from the deal.

The relationship also allowed the U.S. to simultaneously uphold its "Carter era" human rights concerns and to pretend to distance itself from its right wing client states while ensuring that client states like El Salvador had easy access to military supplies and training. If anyone thinks that would have happened had the U.S. seriously opposed such a relationship, I'd like to hear the case that the U.S. couldn't have prevented Israeli arms being supplied to El Salvador or Guatemala if the U.S. really opposed it.

The hawkish foreign policy establishments of both the U.S. and Israel find ways to keep their insane activities going, in times both fallow and fertile.

Now, for example, had the "Israeli lobby" suddenly started (for imaginary reasons, just suppose) opposing Reagan's contra war or U.S. support of "secret police" death squads and genocidalists in El Salvador and Guatemala, "the lobby" would have seen its influence on these matters drop to zero.

So far, though, I think this is just my opinion, because I don't really know of any case where the hawkish Israeli foreign policy establishment seriously came into conflict with the hawkish U.S. foreign policy establishment, at least in a situation where each seemed both strongly unified and strongly opposed. Maybe I'm forgetting a case this evening.