Didn’t it ever make you wonder? The guy who runs Microsoft is certainly at least one of the smartest guys at Microsoft. The dude running Tesla is probably one of the brightest people on Earth. You can argue whether they’re the kind of people you’d want at a family barbecue, but you can’t say they’re stupid.
On the other hand, you can say that about the last ten American presidents (excepting Bill Clinton, and he had his own playbook). Some of them were imbeciles, and the brainiac we have now (2023) can no longer move the pen during an EEG test. Apparently by his own initiative, he’s started a proxy war with a huge, nasty nuclear superpower without a reason anybody can understand, and is now assuring World War Three by involving the whole country in a 3,000 year old border war that every participant is guaranteed to lose; an endless conflict involving hate-driven maniacs who regularly threaten each other with atomic annihilation and routinely kill each other’s wives and children without a sign of remorse.
Even if they weren’t at war, these whackos would be dangerous psychopaths that everybody should avoid until the Devil finds good jobs for them in Hell. There are no American interests that are served by helping or hindering any of them. A person of even moderate discretion would stay out of it and advise anyone else to do the same. Yet, every president of the last century has considered himself qualified to meddle in a violent paradox that makes the Big Bang look like a wet m-80 in a fresh puddle. “The Middle East War” isn’t even a “thing”. It’s 8,324 things. It started a generation after the Israelite Exodus around 1400 BC and continued more or less unabated till the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD. Then the various factions thereabouts got to fight each other for equally unclear reasons till some flashbulb decided to start it up again in 1948 by evicting an entire country full of already angry people from Palestine and dumping a few million of their worst enemies on top of them.
If the bad judgement of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman weren’t enough, the new Palestinian landlords somehow convinced the next several American presidents to build them a huge military and a gigantic treasury to fund it. Then they persisted in expressing amazement for the next fifty years at how uncivilly the evicted people behaved towards Americans.
Therein lies the difference between the savvy violent psychopaths–like Alexander the Great or Joseph Stalin–and elitist ivory tower killers like George Bush and Joseph Biden. When Joe Stalin ran over three thousand peasants with a handful of tanks, he was well aware that the relatives of the dead would be displeased with him. When George Bush bombed Iraq and Afghanistan into the Pleistocene Era (again for no reason anybody rational could explain), I believe the surprise he expressed at the anger of the natives may have been unfeigned. The American Exceptionalist education he received at Yale and Skull and Bones and the Texas Air National Guard may have really convinced him that poor people from other countries would immediately understand what a privilege it was to be occupied and economically ruined by a noble adversary like the United States. After all, we killed and maimed and lied and confiscated in the name of Democracy. That was good enough for Adolf Hitler, who had the good sense to die after a very sound defeat. It should have been good enough for Osama Bin Laden, who somehow survived so many assassination attempts that the CIA had to find somebody to impersonate him just so they could shoot him, dump him into the ocean without an investigation and put the matter to bed in the sleepy eyes of the myopic American news media.
George Bush II discovered what Lyndon Johnson and Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan had already seen. The people in the Middle East, on either side, just didn’t make very good enemies. They didn’t necessarily start wars on any definite date or in any particular place, and they never ended wars for any reason, anywhere. When they ran out of guns and explosives, there was a lull in the fighting while Russia or America or Britain bought them some more.
Now, stupidity in the American ruling class is understandable. After all, we inherited most of ours from England, and they’re all idiots. What is hard to fathom, however, is why none of them ever learn from the mistakes of the others. Surely Harry Truman had figured out a year after the dumb Israel faux-pas in 48 that he had made one of the most deadly foreign policy errors in history. But that didn’t stop the Bushes from making his disastrous decision a million times worse.
Really, if a cocker spaniel runs into the street and gets hit by an eighteen wheeler, does the beagle with him immediately dart into traffic to see if it happens again? Is our leadership really not up to the reasoning capacity of small domesticated mammals who spend their entire lives stymied by doorknobs and refrigerator doors? The answer is a sobering one, it seems.
We the put-upon citizenry have a full year to think about this in a different way. Whatever political organization the reader happens to belong to, your party has led us unerringly into mindless conflict after mindless conflict, has bankrupted the treasury and stolen your children’s inheritance for the last hundred years. If you actually think that will change by the next presidential election, you might be as dumb as the President.
