Eggheads & Ideas

Looks like the Pentagon is justifying all that money we give them. No, they're not starting a new war (but give them time). No, they're not training dolphins to find mines in the Persian Gulf, and apparently they've rejected Dick Cheney's scheme of killing some Navy Seals in the Strait of Hormuz and pinning the rap on the Iranians in order to justify bombing them. But don't go attributing these happy developments to an uncharacteristic outbreak of common sense or morality at the Pentagon. Recall that they produced a videotape several years ago entitled Thinking Outside the Box, Poisoning The Enemy's Water Supply. No, they're justifying the ruinous military budget that will eventually bankrupt America by proposing a new program: the Minerva Research Initiative. According to Fox News (I know, I know.), "The Pentagon already has its share of weapons and tanks. Now it seeks a new weapon in the war on terror, eggheads and ideas." It seems that after sixty years of monumental fuck-ups (see Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War II, Afghanistan), some bright lights at the Defense Department decided it would be a good idea to establish a consortium of universities to study such original topics as, and I quote Fox News, "war, and the conditions that lead to it."

(I guess their consortium of television networks isn't enough.)

Let me suggest a few recent causes of "war, and the conditions that lead to it" that probably won't be found in any of the papers likely to be written by the lapdog professors who participate in this bullshit program.

1. Presidents and Vice-Presidents who lie about foreign countries in order to justify invading them.

2. Intelligence agencies that produce inaccurate, misleading and false information to bolster those lies.

3. Dim-witted careerists at the Pentagon who go with the flow, as well as their retired colleagues who get paid by defense contractors to appear on television and knowingly spread said lies and misinformation.

4. Compulsive meddling in the internal affairs of foreign countries that pisses them off, creating anti-American hostility and blowback against us.

Undoubtedly, the legions of would-be Kissinger's who participate in this crap will offer up the same buffet of asinine platitudes that have justified our disastrous interventions abroad for years: lack of democracy, lack of economic opportunity, extremist ideology or, my personal favorite, a widespread perception that America 'lacks the resolve' to carry the job through, or some such self-serving nonsense.

I'm reminded of a scene from Full Metal Jacket, where Matthew Modine's character is being yelled at by an officer because he's wearing a peace symbol. The officer tells him, "inside every gook there is an American trying to get out." It's pretty funny, and the reason it's funny is because that's exactly how employees of the State Department, the Defense Department, and conservative academics who thirst for prestige, think.

I suggest we save the money and just direct the Pentagon to the works of Thomas Freidman or Victor Davis Hanson. That's the type of thinking they're going to adopt anyway.