A Reality-Based Ass-Kicking

Glenn Greenwald on what the enabling war-enablers and our media can learn AND SADLY WON'T from Israel:

Unlike our chest-beating, play-acting warriors here, war is not something that Israelis cheer on for fun like a video game from behind their computer monitor or sitting on their sofa watching CNN or Fox. When they advocate wars, they pay a price. As a result, they don't have the luxury of shutting their eyes and pretending that things are going well -- or exploiting accusations of treason in order to stifle war criticisms -- or cheering on failing wars for years for no reason other than to avoid having to admit error or feel weak.

All of that stands in such stark contrast to the shrinking though still-substantial faction in this country who see war as a fun and sterile video game that never requires them to pay any price -- no matter how profoundly the war fails. That is what enables them to cheer on those wars for years without end, to urge still new and more destructive ones, and to childishly insist that there is something noble and compulsory about keeping quiet, loyally cheering on the Leader's war, and pretending that things are going great and we are on the verge of success.

Indeed, while the Israelis who were actually at risk from the Lebanon war wanted it to end, the crazed (and safe) neoconservative warmongers in the U.S. were furious when the war ended. And -- needless to say -- they ran around accusing everyone responsible for the war's end of appeasement and cowardice and all of their other inane war-cheering platitudes that have driven this country so tragically off-course.

Only people who have adolescent views of war -- only people for whom war is a distant, cartoon concept and not a reality, the primary purpose of which is to make them endow themselves with personal sensations of strength, power and purpose in the most risk-free manner possible -- have the luxury of indulging such fantasies. That is why the Israelis do not and cannot, whereas America's right-wing pretend warriors embrace those fantasies with increasing vigor and desperation as the failure of their wars become more inescapable.

On this, the Fourth Annivesary of "Mission Accomplished" it is one of his most powerful essays, which is saying something.