How Stupid Are They?

[Ether St. Vying]

This is my favourite rant in a long time.

Ether

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Tiny comfort offsets huge stupidity of war

MICHELE LANDSBERG
[]
It's my age, I guess. At one time, I might have been caught up in the
theoretical or historical arguments. This time around, I'm fighting
against a tide of feeling that is probably way too simple, and it's
this: The men who dreamed up this war and are pushing it forward and
making the decisions that will affect us all, for decades to come, are
stupid. They are so
stupid that they think human lives are crockery to be broken. They are
so stupid they
thought their tanks would be greeted with roses.

They are so stupid that they seem to think it's a shocking breach of
etiquette if people who
are attacked respond with "terrorist" acts in their own defence against
an army invading
their country. They are so stupidly arrogant that they can't even
bother to get the name of
their enemy right: They call it Eye-rak. They think they can stand at
lecterns and
microphones and sternly scold Iran and Syria not to "interfere" while
they themselves
invade and occupy a sovereign nation.

They are so stupid that they choose to send their own young people to
die in some distant
desert, and think it good. They are so stupid that they think they can
"win" a war, even
after Vietnam, even after Afghanistan.

There's some basic human understanding of the world and its people that
is simply absent
from these men.

That's a dangerous thought, scarier than thinking they are evil or
greedy, and riskier to say
out loud in public than almost anything else. It opens a pit beneath
our feet where once we
thought was solid ground.
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