Falling Down the Staircase Again

A CNN poll says that 53% of respondents favor sending American troops into Iraq or Syrian. Presumably these are people with long term memory problems because the last time American troops invaded Iraq it didn't go well. Remember? Let's leave aside the question of whether the corporate conservative media, of which CNN is an egregious example, is engaging in "push polling" in order to further its warmongering agenda. We need to remember that war has consequences, death and destruction being the most prominent of them. War is not a sporting event, where the worst thing that can happen is a few broken bones.

Much of the war fever might be the product of "Messianic Militarism," a deranged turn in many fundamentalists that mash-up militarism with religion. Another influence are those trashy Hollywood movies. I think that many people think that war is just "going in there" and shooting "the bad guys." War is much more complicated than that and unless you are willing to pay the price and live with the consequences, you better not start.