Do not trust the warmongers
Writing for Jacobin magazine in an article titled The Chicken Hawks Want War With Iran, Liza Featherstone makes a trenchant critique of the warmongering class in the United States:
We could be on the brink of World War III. Israel assassinated a Hezbollah leader, Iran bombed Israel, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, and the United States deployed more troops and fighter jets to the Middle East. Israel won’t back down on Lebanon or Gaza, and both Israel and Iran have nuclear weapons.
It’s scary — and a bipartisan chorus of nerds who probably couldn’t win a bar fight is eager to make it even scarier.
The final sentence is the key issue here. Forget about geopolitics and ideological battle lines for a moment. War is simply not costly for many of its proponents. They are part of an elite that is insulated from the suffering and will in one way or another benefit from the situation. They are shameless and unscrupulous in making a political career out of jingoism while helping their corporate cronies earn a profit from all the destruction they cause. The ones who will be tasked to do the fighting typically are physically fit, working class males.
The USA’s decades-long policy of continuous warfare must be understood as part of the symbiotic relationship between the state apparatus, the military industry, and the financial establishment. War generates debt, which entails a need for borrowing money that is done via the issuance of yet more debt (government bonds), which is then marked as a triple-A rated asset that works as collateral for other financial derivatives. It is a lucrative business for those at the top and a bottomless source of discomfort, pain, PTSD, or death for the rest.
In this light, the elites have a perverse incentive to always discover a bugaboo somewhere that supposedly poses an existential threat to Americans and their allies. Such is the twisted conduct of imperialism: to continuously interfere in the affairs of countries around the world and, when they unsurprisingly retaliate, to play the victim and call for more war against such “terror”.
The establishment will rump up the patriotic rhetoric to brainwash the average lad into thinking that he has to fight for his country. Men are hardwired or conditioned to protect those they love (whether this is nature or nurture is beside the point) and the regime seeks to exploit that disposition by turning it into a duty to forward the agenda of imperialism.
When demagoguery fails, the authorities will resort to enlisting people by force. Those who have the luxury to relocate to another jurisdiction will flee, while the poorer folk will stay behind to be integrated into the war machine. This is yet another expression of the class divide that frames these phenomena.
The way of the gun is not the solution. Mental gymnastics such as “deescalation through escalation” will simply engender more distaste for the perpetrators, which will, in turn, all but guarantee future armed conflicts.
Unless those loud warmongers are willing to lead by example in fighting from the front lines, they cannot be trusted to have the general good in mind.