I didn't go off looking for cites because, I always knew that the US nuclear arsenal was in place as a deterrent against a conventional attack on Europe. I'm guessing that you're younger than I am, but during the Cold war, that was pretty much common knowlege.

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/061603.html

Insanity.

No one shares your obsession.....Go find another house to haunt.

Unfortunately, the "boys with toys" mentality is all too common amongst our senior officer corps

Its also pretty much responsible for the whole NSA wiretapping scandal. What, after all, is the fun of having all the toys if you don't get to play with them?

snark detection failures on one thread.

just a reminder to check your snark detecter batteries every 6 months (preferably when changing to and from DST)

Has anyone done any empirical research on the institutional memory of the American public? Is there any scientific evidence that we collectively are really this stupid? Is there any basis for the strategy or is this yet another example of wishful thinking taking the place of considered judgment?

These aree not rhetorical questions. I really want to know.

Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army and US Army Reserves and retired as a colonel. She served 16 years in the US diplomatic corps in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Micronesia and Mongolia. She resigned from the US Department of State in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq."

Don't you know that in the Republic of Wingnuttia, opposition to the current grand adventure, automatically and immediately renders your previous service non-existent.

Just ask:

Scott Ritter

Karen Kwiatkowski

Richard A. Clarke.

Paul O'Neill

Joe Wilson

Valerie Plame

Sibel Edmonds

(If anyone cares to add to this list, we could probably reach 100 names in no time.)

any collective (ie, the American people) that would vote for George W. Bush twice is quite stupid.

Granted, but the the '06 elections showed that there is only a certain amount of twisting that reality can withstand before a tear develops and the truth starts becoming visible. Glenn's post today, is first-hand evidence that the administration and their enablers-in-print are still counting on the inattention of the audience. It will be interesting to see if it works.

Sorry, my freedom is not yours to give away.

On a more practical note, diluting the evil among more bodies isn't going to make it any less evil. It will just require a louder and more persistent fear-chamber in order to rally the masses to the cause. When all the TV channels are owned by the same people building the cruise missle components, sending little Joey off to suffer with his volunteer neighbors isn't going to change a thing!

Yeah, that worked like a champ in Viet Nam.

For the record, over 1/3'rd the number of Americans were killed as are currently deployed in Iraq and it still took 12 years for sanity to prevail. Sharing the burden sounds great in theory but if you actually think it would immediately bring an end to the war then your living in an even more lucid fantasy than I am.

Maybe instead of the draft, only those who vote in a national referendum supporting the war should have to pay for it out of their pockets

The "Cost of Iraq: counter currently reads $429,090,878,934.

The US population is 301,139,947 or $1388 for every person in America.

(I'm actually surprised, before I did the calculation I thought it would be higher.)

But the bottom line remains, if the cost of the war weren't being buried in record budget deficits which seem to concern approximately nobody at the moment, then perhaps people would realize the degree to which we're being taken for a ride and do something about it.

I still think its more about failed triangulation than it is about actual complicity. I've occasionally made the same point about the networks. If they actually thought, in this day and age that a show with an antiwar message would be a commercial success and make them boatloads of money, they'd promote the crap out of it. But as long as the dinosaur* we call conventional wisdom doesn't see the possibility, it's not going to happen.

*(substitute your own analogy for something that's slow moving, blind but has way too much momentum here)

The whole point of the article is that its all egg.

Between the consultants and the reporters who only see the situation from the point of view of the narrative or story line, the possibilty that the American people might believe something they haven't been spoon-fed just doesn't register.

Its the whole Emporer's New Clothes story playing out in real life. No one wants to be the first to notice the truth. Let alone commit it to print!

whether the American people were too stupid to understand the difference between supporting the troops and cheerleading the war was abruptly interrupted by someone who wished to brag that they were indeed that stupid.

On a related note, anyone who can come up with the phrase collapses of its own weightlessness is someone whos opinion on language usage is worth considering.

I've always felt that the reason it was important NOT to refer to the Iraq situation as a war is because it takes the football game metaphor off the table. Football games end when the clock runs out and someone is declared the victor. Wars are no longer like that and occupations even less so. Anyone who talks about winning or losing in Iraq is already taking advantage of lazy thinking and obscuring the truth in the process. Its a way of thinking that needs to be fought at every opportunity.

Thats the beauty of it...

I'd like to add it to my arsenal, don't change a thing.