Oh, look. It’s Stephen Hayes, the guy who managed to write an entire book of fiction about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent relationship with Al Qaeda yet still hasn’t seen fit to shut up in public despite having been so tragically wrong about everything, and he’s just written another 2,000 word piece that basically could be summed up in one sentence:
“Obama doesn’t use the word “war” enough.”
I’ll tell you what, Stephen. When you on the right support anything that would let the American public suffer a little bit to fund your unending wars, we’ll then worry about how often the Kenyan Preznit mutters the word “war.” So what will it be, Stephen? Will you support a tax increase to pay for your excellent adventures?
These guys want to run around playing their little keyboard warrior games, but rest assured, the very last thing they want is the public to feel the pinch of war. Because when they do, little Steve’s war games would end right quick. Does anyone think we would have been in Afghanistan for the last decade if our taxes had been increased to actually pay for that war?
MattF
And he’s not kidding! Youth is wasted on the young, so let’s kill them.
Maude
Where was he when the shooting started?
This reminds me that Bush had a life long pattern of running away when the going got tough.
Like, 9/11 and Katrina.
But he sure could send the young men and women to hell in Afghanistan and Iraq without a qualm.
The Grand Panjandrum
Two things would keep us from fighting never ending wars. Proper taxing to pay for the effort AND the draft. Iraq and Afghanistan would have either never happened or be settled by now if it had been paid for AND all draft age eligible males had been subject to possible deployment. Start bringing home the bodies of Senators and Captains of Industry in casket, emptying their bank accounts, and the antiwar movement would have been lead by the GOP and Fox News.
David
“Decider” seems to be missing from Obama’s vocabulary as well.
cleek
on a majestic black stallion, with a feather in his cap, and a long shiny sword ?
would that get professional Republicans to follow ? or would they continue to make up new reasons to whine and moan ?
Derek
“Excellent adventures.” I lolled.
joe from Lowell
I think you’re misunderstanding Hayes’ complaint. He doesn’t say that Obama doesn’t say the word “war” enough, because Obama does talk about “war” all the time. He frequently talks about being at war with al Qaeda.
Here’s Hayes’ first line:
First of all, “terrorism” is silly. Obama talks about terrorism all the time, too. Hayes’ actual complaint is about the other two words: “jihad” and “Islamic extremism.” Hayes’ argument is that Obama has misdiagnosed who we are at war with.
Hayes, and the other people who make this argument, want us to be at war with Islam. They want a combination holy war/clash of civilizations. They want the United States to lead Christendom against Dar al Islam. They look at Muslims, all Muslims, and see the enemy.
Obama, and the sane people of the world, think we’re at war, but identify the enemy quite differently. Obama thinks the United States and its friends are at war with a shadowy confederation of violent terrorists, called by the shorthand “al Qaeda.” He looks at most of the world’s Muslims, and seen bystanders, allies, or potential allies.
In short, Obama doesn’t want to use language that identified the enemy with Islam, because he doesn’t want any more Muslims to identify themselves with al Qaeda. Hayes thinks exactly the opposite – he wants the president to use language identifying Muslims with al Qaeda as much as possible, because he wants religious/societal polarization. Stephen Hays is complaining because Barack Obama isn’t purposely turning people who are not our enemies into our enemies.
Well, screw him.
mclaren
The troops are slowly but surely exiting Iraq and at some point, reality has got to set in and we’ll leave Afghanistan.
At that point we arrive at a really interesting question…with zero foreign wars and no credible foreign threats, how do we justify spending 1 trillion dollars plus on the U.S. military every year?
Hint: China doesn’t count. The Chinese are so symbiotically linked to us economically that if they dared to attack us, the Chinese economy would crater the next day. America needs Chinese cash and lots of it to keep our interest rates low and our national debt serviced with regular payments, while China needs America as a market for its goods and services. Despite neocon fantasies of Chinese paratroopers dropping into Greeley Idaho and taking us over, ain’t gonna happen.
So what “threat” will we need the bloated trillion-dollar-a-year U.S. military to protect us from after we’ve left Iraq and Afghanistan?
Tierra del Fuego?
Monaco?
Patagonia…?
joe from Lowell
Of course he does, you idiot! Obama and Napolitano want to downplay the attack, for the exactly the same reason that the Taliban wanted to up-play the attack: because the object of a terrorist attack is to send a ripple of fear through the society in which the attack takes place. The bigger the splash, the more successful it is. The smaller the splash, the less successful.
It’s the same reason that we describe as “cowardly” actions that, looked at objectively, take a lotta balls, like puttering a rubber boat up to an American destroyer and blowing yourself to kingdom come. That takes a lotta balls! We call it “cowardly” because the enemy wants to make suicide terrorists look like brave heroes to “their side” and like terrifying supervillains to us. Demeaning these jerks is tactical, done to achieve a purpose – that is, to prevent the enemy from achieving his goals.
But, once again, Hayes’ misunderstanding leads him to work actively on the side of advancing the enemy’s goals, because on a tactical level, he shares their goals. Al Qaeda wants to make this a holy war / clash of civilizations, and get the world’s Muslims to line up against the West, and so does Hayes. They, obviously, have very different strategic purposes, but they share this tactical goal.
Stephen Hayes, in his delusion, corruption, and stupidity, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
dmsilev
I’ve recently been rewatching the Ken Burns Civil War series (thanks to whoever it was that pointed out that Netflix has it available on streaming download), and the bits showing all the ugliness of the dead and wounded should be required viewing for anyone who spouts off about the desireability of war and similar nonsense.
dms
AJ
I’ve been saying that for years – the way to shut the bloody yap of any Reich-wing nutsac is to attach language to any bill that forces a tax increase to pay for the project.
Go to war? Sure. Passage automatically triggers a tax increase.
Think a fence on the border will work and it’s critical to American “security”? – then you will have no trouble supporting the tax increase to pay for it, NO?
Want off-shore drilling? Then every spill that the government has to clean up triggers a tax increase to pay for it.
A few years ago one of the more reasonable local Republicans had a radio show and the topic this day was Pat Buchanan’s column the day before saying our military was too small and we needed to increase its size by a few divisions. Most of his Reich-wing yambag callers supported the idea. I got an email to the guy and said if they are really serious that more divisions are needed, then they won’t onbject to a tax increase to pay for it…?
The guy (being a reasonable Republican; a creature very hard to find) ACTUALLY READ IT ON THE AIR and brought it up to every subsequent caller. Each supporter of the idea dodged the issue; “We’ll have to find a way…” yadda-yadda…. The host held on for a while, then it was over.
DonkeyKong
I think Hayes mother didn’t use the phrase, “Shut the fuck up!” enough when he was a little grub.
licensed to kill time
Whenever I see a new and stunning image taken by the Hubble telescope or the Planck space observatory, I think “That’s the kind of thing we should spend our tax dollars on”.
Whenever I hear about programs designed to help people get an education, a job, food, public transit, see and hear art, have access to libraries and computers, I think “That’s the kind of thing we should spend our tax dollars on”.
Whenever I hear about the obscene amount of money we spend on “defending ourselves” against nebulous enemies that primarily exist either in the past or in some fevered imaginations, I think “Jeez, that money could have been spent to actually help people live instead of helping people die“.
I’m proud to be a DFH, Gawd Bless the D.F. Hippies!
Screw the warmongers.
Yutsano
@licensed to kill time: We could dump about a third of our military budget simply by eliminating programs designed for enemies that no longer exist. Like our tank programs. Who the hell uses a tank anymore except the Chinese to run over their own citizens? Plus the number two in military spending, China, not only can’t do a tenth of what we can militarily, they can barely maintain what they have now. If we’re the world’s police force (and trust me Europe LOVES that we spend all this money so they don’t have to) then we should just be honest about that and tell the world to eff off and let us do our work. I don’t think it’s an effective use of my tax monies either.
Xboxershorts
I’ve often found it surprising that NeoCon zines like NRO and The Standard have been able to survive so long without accepting on-line commentary. Of course, this is how they maintain ideological purity, they have no one to argue with, except themselves.
Epistemic closure and all that….
sloan
Waaaah! Obama won’t let us define the terms of foreign policy debate! Waaaah!
It reminds me of Giuliani whining in his failed 2008 prez campaign that “Obama won’t say Islamo-fascist! He won’t say it!”
licensed to kill time
@Yutsano:
And when there is talk about cutting outdated or ineffective military projects, all you ever hear is wailing and gnashing of teeth about the jobs that will be lost. Can’t do something painful in the short term for a long term benefit, nosiree.
El Cid
War war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war war…
Brachiator
Yes
@dmsilev:
Yes, because fighting to preserve the Union and to end slavery was such a honkingly obscene waste of time.
Hart Williams
Isn’t that the GOP modus operandi? Everything they’ve touched has turned to shit, but the Rovaks continually market the message that all those polished turds are purest gold.
He’s just being consistent.
(BTW: Oceana is winning! Go Oceana! Rah rah rah!)
Svensker
@mclaren:
Where were you between 1991 and 2003?
Liberty60
@AJ:
And I have been saying, conversely, that anyone who is serious about deficits needs to start with the Trillion or so we spend on DoD/ Homeland Security. Or if you like, the Trillion we spend on Soc Security. Or the 1/2 Trillion we spend on Medicare.
Of course, this presents difficult choices, and unpopular stands. So they return to braying “Islamofascism!” all the louder.
JGabriel
John Cole:
Actually, yes. Raising taxes to pay for Afghanistan wouldn’t have made the Bush administration any more competent at catching bin Laden, so, yeah, I think we’d still be there – because, until recently, it was political suicide to even think about pulling out of Afghanistan without catching him (and it still may be).
But I think we would have pulled out of Iraq quicker. I’d like to think we wouldn’t have gone in at all, but again, we have to deal with the Bush administration. Bush & Cheney were hell-bent on getting Hussein, which they eventually did – but if they had to raise taxes to pay for Iraq, they would have pulled out of there almost as soon as Hussein was hung.
.
Hart Williams
Ah, I love the stench of trolls in the morning. It smells LIKE VICTORY!
(Now, surf’s up!)
Cacti
The easiest way to make the public lose it’s taste for Military adventurism around the world would be…
Pass a war tax and reinstate the draft every time.
burnspbesq
Along similar lines, there is a piece in this morning’s FT that basically takes the position that Obama’s hands are tied on energy policy (including having no ability to put a meaningful moratorium on deepwater drilling) because the American people won’t make the necessary sacrifices.
The author is from The Weekly Standard, and the tone is dickishly smug, but can you say with confidence that he’s wrong?
Cacti
@Yutsano:
One of the things that Donald Rumsfeld actually got right during his reign of error is that the U.S. military is a bloated, Cold War era force, that needs to have some fat trimmed from it.
Unsurprisingly, this practical advice was completely ignored.
Brachiator
@burnspbesq:
What “necessary” sacrifices should we be making? The economy is still weak, job growth anemic. And so, what, we should strap on higher energy and other living costs to achieve what exactly?
And by the way, I think that “drill baby drill” is a bunch of BS, especially because it is linked to the fantasy that there are undersea oil reserves greater than known quantities of Middle Eastern oil.
On the other hand, I have no idea what austerity fantasies are supposed to accomplish.
Silver Owl
War the viagra for men like Hayes.
wrb
@burnspbesq:
I fear he’s right. Which leads me to bring up an idea I mentioned in passing the other day.
About the only thing I can see working is a carbon tax that is demonstrably neutral with regard to the total taxes paid by the average individual. None gets used for cool new technologies, tempting as they are. 100% of the revenue raised gets returned as tax refunds, but each citizen gets an equal refund, so you can profit by reducing your consumption.
Control and profit opportunities are popular.
r€nato
@Cacti: Rumsfeld had the right idea, and he had the balls and savvy to push through all the entrenched bureaucracies and interests which keep the Pentagon spending billions on obsolete/useless hardware programs.
His great downfall was his inability to listen to anyone else, his supreme hubris. He was notorious as a bully who brooked no dissent and wouldn’t listen to others’ opinions. He was right, end of story. He was the worst possible example of civilian leadership of the military. Talk about epistemic closure, he had it in spades.
It didn’t help matters when he seemed supremely indifferent to the evidence that his war was failing badly. Generals really do care about the lives of their troops, even when their duty is to send them into battle which inevitably will kill some of them. I have several Army buddies who, to this day, cannot say the name ‘Rumsfeld’ without spitting it out with the greatest contempt.
Rummy might have succeeded in a badly-needed transformation of our military, if he had not insisted on going to war while in the midst of transforming it, something which is not done in a year or two. Now his ideas – which were not at all bad ones – are completely discredited because they are associated with his disastrous tenure as SecDef.
(Where have Rummy and Condi gone, by the way? You don’t hear a damned thing about either of them…)
Yutsano
@Cacti: Rumsfeld wanted to do everything on the cheap. Witness the numerous armor failures and soldiers writing home for BASIC SUPPLIES during the Iraq mishegas. Not to mention firing generals who insisted that it would take 500,000 forces to pull this off correctly (who was vindicated later). But Rumsfeld wanted shiny new useless toys at the expense of grunts. He was a despicable Sec of Def.
@r€nato: Or this.
Derek
Obviously you don’t have to raise taxes just to go to war, or do anything else. You can get all the money you need by firing teachers!
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
Problem is, there was no way to pull off the Iraq invasion “correctly.” The number of troops were never the issue.
Just as despicable as his bosses, Bush and Cheney.
Cacti
@r€nato:
You obviously know more about this than I do.
Yutsano
@Brachiator: I was in college when 9/11 happened. My roommate at the time (who has family in NY state but not the city) was in tears. As we were listening to how things unfolded, I had a really bad feeling. It only got worse as the march to the Iraq war persisted. I knew at that moment what kind of president Bush was. And how fucked we were going to be for a very long time. I feel bad Shinseki didn’t get the honor of resigning his commission (and I’m very pleased with his current role) but unfortunately he wasn’t the one in charge. Rumsfeld shopped generals until he got the answers he wanted. Because dammit, he was RIGHT!!
Oh and in response to your oil under the sea comment: there is a HUGE field under the Atlantic Ocean…near Brazil. They are scrambling to recover that as it is supposed to be four times the amount of all the oil in the Middle East.
Quiddity
Question: Has Hayes walked back the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link claims?
Or does he still maintain his position?
mclaren
@Yutsano:
Jeez. A third???
Dude…carriers. They’re worthless today. The Russian skhval-class torpedo uses supercavitation to travel at 360 kh/hr (that’s roughly 200 miles per hour) underwater. It’s so fast no vessel can maneuver quickly enough to evade it. But the skhval-class torpedo dates from 1995, and word has it that today the Chinese and Russians have developed supercavitating torpedos that travel underwater at supersonic speeds.
So carriers? Gone. Dead. 3 minutes into any naval battle, all the carriers are sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
Then we have the destroyers and other support vessels in a carrier group. Widely available stealth cruise missiles, which are radar-invisible, will make short work of those.
So let’s start with getting rid of every carrier battle group in the U.S. navy, because those are just giant floating targets. They’re going straight to the bottom in the first five minutes of any modern naval engagement. The only capital ships left in the U.S. navy are submarines — and since we no longer need the ballistic missile submarines, we can get rid of those too.
That leaves us with zero surface navy and only 1/3 of our submarines as a functional navy. The rest are either worthless (Against whom to we launch those 3,000 polaris nuclear missiles? The whales? Polar bears in the arctic? That giant plastic bag garbage patch in the Pacific?) or unsurvivable in any naval battle beyond the first couple of minutes.
Moving on to the air force, two words: G forces. UAVs are obviously the future of the air force since drones can pull G forces that would turn any human pilot to pulp. This means that the guaranteed winner in future air sorties will be remote piloted UAVs, since they can out-accelerate and out-climb any human-piloted fighter. So zero out all our manned fighters and replace ’em with ridiculously cheap UAVS.
Now we come to the army. We’ve got an army designed to storm the Beaches at Normany, which would be great, except that modern wars no longer work that way. You’re certainly correct that giant tanks battles are now a thing of the past — Saddam’s idiotic last stand surely represents the last great tank battle in modern history. As we saw during Desert Storm, the A-10 Warthog makes short work of tanks, and we’ve got much more lethal anti-tank weapons today (handheld shaped-charge wire-guided anti-tank missiles that can be steered in flight. Sounds like science fiction, but they’re real: you can steer one of those pups around a corner if you want to).
Modern artillery is getting obsoleted by next-gen UAVs that can stay aloft for a week or more. Fighter planes are getting obsoleted by the air force’s new generation of UAVs and semi-ballistic suborbital unmanned attack craft that operate outside the earth’s atmosphere. The army itself plans to replace 30% of its forces with robots by the year 2030.
So we don’t need those 300,000 troops. Tanks? Obsolete. Artillery? Obsolete. Landing craft? Obsolete.
Moreover, future wars are going to look more like Somalia in 1993 that France in 1944. So we don’t need anywhere near as many people in the U.S. army, and we’re going to need mainly medics and sanitation engineers and civil engineers with experience rebuilding smashed infrastructure instead of battle-hardened infantry with experience zeroing in on enemy mortar positions via the laser targeting system in an M1A1 Abrams tank.
In future conflicts, American troops are a lot more likely to need field medics to vaccinate sick refugee children and civil engineers to help build sanitary latrines for half a million global warming flood refugees than machine gun squads trained to storm the beaches of Tripoli.
Cut one third of our military budget?
We could easily cut 2/3 of our military and come out ahead.
The U.S. navy is designed to fight and win the Battle of Midway and the Battle of the Coral Sea — but no one is ever going to fight those kinds of battles again, because the technology has gone way past that. The U.S. army is designed to fight and win the Battle of the Bulge — but no one is ever going to fight those kinds of battles again, because the technology has gone way past that. The U.S. air force is designed to fight and win dogfights over North Korea — but no one is ever going to fight those kinds of battles again, because the technology has gone way past that.
If we wanted to really save some money, we could cut well over 80% of our military budget and still have plenty of military capability left to defend our coasts and defend U.S. airspace and intervene in Kosovo-type crises if the need arose. We just wouldn’t be able to storm the beaches of Normandy again.
Fortunately, no one is ever going to have to storm the beaches of Normandy again, so that’s a non-issue. Today’s conflicts involve fourth generation warfare, and the U.S. army as it is currently constituted is not one generation of warfare behind the times, but two.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
And this is the terrible predicament that we are still trying to resolve. The 9/11 attacks had nothing to do with Iraq, and our leaders have neither faced up to nor found a way to undo the awful consequences of this first bad decision to invade Iraq.
matoko_chan
jeezus-h-keeriist-inna-handcart
Steven Hayes was a big promoter of the infamous Harmony database and using the Superawesome Power of the Web to translate a buncha crap documents that Saddam threw out.
Have you forgotten the Harmony database and how Cap’n Stupid and Instadolt harnessed the “Power of the Davids” to translate a buncha worthless arabic crap that Bushco ALREADY KNEW had zero information content? Something I wrote then…..
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Question: Has Hayes walked back the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link claims? Or does he still maintain his position?
Lordy no. Neocon War pRon eros violation of the highest order.
Yutsano
@Brachiator: Hell, I was a lowly undergrad Asian Studies major (Islam and Japan were my concentrations, don’t ask) and I was screaming to anyone who would listen about how invading Iraq was a VERY bad idea. Saddam, for all his faults (and I excuse none of them) kept the Sunni and the Shi’a from killing each other. I am honestly amazed things are as stable as they are right now. We will be paying on many front for the sins of George Walker Bush for a very long time.
Rich Harzon
http://www.france24.com/en/20100428-slain-qaeda-militant-arrived-iraq-under-saddam
non-existent link between Saddam and al Qaeda my ass
Yutsano
@Rich Harzon: Sigh. You wingnuts would be a lot more credible if you bothered to read beyond the stupid headline.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Rich Harzon: So he traveled to Iraq before the invasion, according to his wife. Proves nothing about operational links with Saddam, nor even that he was an AQ member at the time. Sounds like his wife didn’t even know, just that he was a “secretive Character”/
Try again wingnut troll.
Xanthippas
If it cost us a dollar more per gallon of gas, bin Laden could be running a brothel for terrorists with big neon signs that say “bomb here” and we’d pass on it. But if it saves us five cents a gallon we’re all “Drill baby drill!”
Future humans living in solar-powered colonies orbiting the planet five hundred years from now are going to think really poorly of us, ya’ll.
Xanthippas
@Rich Harzon:
By that reasoning, there was a link between Mohammed Atta and the Bush administration.
cleek
@Xanthippas:
by that reasoning, there was definitely a link between Rumsfeld and Saddam.
joe from Lowell
@Cacti:
Don Rumsfeld would have made a good peacetime Secretary of Defense.
@Yutsano:
I’ll point out that Rumsfeld’s “on the cheap” military action rolled through Iraq with incredibly speed, success, and efficiency. His war-fighting vision was proven correct. The problem lay elsewhere – in the White House’s vision of a permanent occupation. Rumsfeld didn’t plan for an extended occupation/counter-insurgency war, because he intended us to be in and out quickly, like the first Iraq War or Panama.
joe from Lowell
elfgoldman,
Oh, HELL no!