Remember how popular the Vietnam war was with the general public back in 1963? All the experts said, we're going over there to kick ass and take names, we're liberating the South Vietnamese from Communist tyranny, light at the end of the tunnel, all that. Maxwell Taylor told John Kennedy, seventy-five thousand troops and three years, we'll have those Commies licked. Now the new program evidently is, we're going to do the much same thing to all the oil-producing countries in the Middle East, one after the other; it's gonna be a cakewalk.
Despite the public pronouncements of guys like James Woolsey, my fellow citizens, in the main, are so stupid they think "war is over and we've won"; they don't even realize that there are at least two or three more wars in the pipeline right now. Hell, most of the guys I work with haven't even heard of Richard Perle.
I was ten years old in 1964 and I believed all that crap, but now I'm an adult and way less credulous. In fact, morality aside, I don't believe our sleazebag junta are actually going to succeed in robbing the entire Middle East and sequestering all the oil there is. First, we're taking on not just all the Moslems but the entire world including every other industrialized nation that imports oil; second, our leadership, while they have enormous power, are also really stupid; third, the U.S.A. is weaker and more vulnerable - not just militarily but economically - than the fool in the street imagines.
By the time this project finally collapses, years from now, as far as the majority of voters are concerned "neo-con" will be synonymous with "asshole." But it will take a long time. The thing is it took at least eight years of making a fuss for the antiwar view to prevail back then, so we can expect another eight years, plus or minus, until reality overwhelms the hypnotic effect of all that shouting and flag waving.
My biggest personal fear with regard to Woolsey's proposed decades-long World War IV concerns my son, who is eleven right now. As this fiasco grinds on and on recruitment will get harder, and I'm afraid they might reinstitute the draft.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net