Washington's ISIS War Drums: Do Stupid Stuff, Do It Now!

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/58243/washingtons-isis-war-drums-do-stupid-stuff-do-it-now

Washington's ISIS War Drums: Do Stupid Stuff, Do It Now!
Middle East
by William Boardman | September 11, 2014 - 12:21pm

As Hillary Clinton was widely quoted as saying recently, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

Maybe others have pointed out that this is a pretty stupid statement, but that’s far from the conventional wisdom. Think about the levels of stupidity here. Only “Great nations?” What, small nations don’t need to get their acts together? And who says the United States is a “great” nation, and in what sense is it great, and isn’t spouting a version of the American exceptionalism cliché just another way of doing stupid stuff? As organizing principles go, “Don’t do stupid stuff” is a great place to start. Then all you need to do is figure out what’s stupid and don’t do it: like not voting for war in Iraq in 2002.

What does the aspiring President Clinton offer for her own organizing principle? In her book Hard Choices, she writes: “Making policy is a balancing act. Hopefully we get it more right than wrong.” That means even less than “Don’t do stupid stuff.” That pretty much means: “We’re bound to do stupid stuff but we hope we won’t do too much stupid stuff.”

Of course that makes good political sense coming from the woman who, as Senator Clinton, voted to go to war in Iraq. As if that weren’t totally knowable, in advance, as doing stupid stuff, really stupid stuff. That vote was a clever trap for intimidated Democrats, afraid to stand up to stupid stuff. Senator Clinton was not alone in that rush to war. She, along with Senators Kerry, McCain, Biden, Hagel, McConnell, Reid, and 70 other senators, voted to support the administration lying us into that war on transparently dishonest evidence. It’s kind of cute, in a darkly disastrous way, that these same wrong-headed people are again among those braying most loudly for more war now. It makes a sort of amoral sense, since today’s mess is a continuation of the war they voted for because they presumably didn’t think it was stupid stuff that would last more than a decade.

[Progressive dog]

1. The rest of the artickle by Boardman is actually

a reasonable discussion of why what the US is doing vs ISIS is mostly not stupid.