"Our job is not to make up anybody’s mind, but to open minds, and to make the agony of decision-making so intense you can escape only by thinking."
- Fred W. Friendly (1915-1998)

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad."
- Aldous Huxley

"If you have ever injected truth into politics, then you have no politics."
- Will Rogers

Friday, April 12, 2013

One (Of Many) Ways We Manage to Justify Wars

In my lifetime, the US has fought and lost at least five wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan 1, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan 2).  More if you count the Iraq 1 stalemate as a loss, which it was by any lasting, reasonable criteria.  They get justified by any number of lies or other shenanigans by Washington DC, aided and abetted by the laughingly badly named (if it wasn't so expensive) "defense" industry.
 
One of the more egregious ways is either believing what politicians tell us (i.e. George II) or believing that the government has 'classified' documents to prove everything.  This interesting series shows that the 'legal justification' used by LBJ to justify the Vietnam War was in reality just so much puffed-up Texas hooey......

http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/fool-me-once-avoiding-needless-wars-part-1-the-first-gulf-of-tonkin-incident/

http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/avoiding-needless-wars-part-2-the-second-gulf-of-tonkin-incident/

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