"I'm against the next war"

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I'm not a fan of pronouncement-labels on clothing -- what's the matter with being alive? why isn't that enough? -- but I do like the T-shirt that announces "I'm against the next war."

Today, The Washington Post has a page-one, lede story that smells suspiciously like the run-up to previous wars -- shadowy, unnamed officials purportedly saying that Iran is arming the incumbent regime in Syria, where mass slaughter has left the rest of the world wringing its hands but doing little or nothing. The U.S. and Israel are champing at the bit to deal Iran's nuclear development a fatal blow ... and this sounds like an excuse that may make a righteous strike possible... or help make it possible.

In Iraq, it was "weapons of mass destruction" ... weapons that were never found and helped promote the decade-long killing of tens of thousands, some of them American sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers....

In Afghanistan, another 10-year exercise in grisly futility,  it was the Taliban and its alleged connection to the Sept. 11, 2001, airplane attacks in New York and Washington. The Taliban really is a scary group, but if scary-ness is the touchstone of military attacks, the U.S. would bomb a lot of Africa (further) back into the Stone Age, annihilate Burma, and turn North Korea into a parking lot.

Wars, of course, are money-makers as well as being the mediocre statesman's way of cementing his or her electoral base. Anyone who speaks out can be smothered and stifled with 'patriotic' eyewash ... or better yet, sent to a front where, with luck, a bullet will end their caterwauling. Sometimes I think bullets and bombs are pretty awful, but the lies that precede them are more viscerally heinous by far.
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