My First Post of 2020

And it's an unrolled tweet from Mikel Jollett:

For those of you who didn’t live through the invasion of Iraq, here is what is about to happen:

1. There will be a MASSIVE propaganda push (by Republicans) to frame this act of war as a moral necessity and to act like anyone who opposes it is working for “the enemy.”

2. The propaganda push will include enormous appeals to American militarism disguised as patriotism: flag pins, flyovers, reverent cries to “support the troops,” as if the greatest support you can offer the troops isn’t to keep them from dying for no good reason.

3. Over time, this vague appeal to patriotism and militarism will start to have a specific aim, an invasion, bombings, the takeover of oil fields, the support of proxy wars. These aims will magically align with the financial interests of multi-national corporations.

4. The people in harm's way -- innocent civilians in Iran, mostly -- will be framed and/or dehumanized as "the enemy." This will include everything from racial slurs to endless talking points about their "blood thirst" their "hatred of freedom and Americans." It's utter bullshit.

5. When the bombs start to drop, all of the reporting will be about the small number of US troop casualties.

For example, most Americans know roughly 4,000 US troops died in Iraq.

What most Americans don't know is over 200,000 Iraqi CIVILIANS were killed.

6. This horror too, this murder of children, of families, the bombing of weddings & birthdays, this destruction of entire regions, will be swept up under the guise of American militarism (disguised as patriotism), of "supporting our troops," who are "fighting for our freedom."

7. In the end, and there will be an end -- this isn't the beginning of World War III, this is asymmetrical slaughter -- the vast number of dead will be people who don't even know why the war was waged, they will be mostly young, innocent and brown-skinned. That is the ugly truth.

8. And even the US troops -- most of whom signed up out of a genuine desire to protect their country -- they will be abandoned too as the people who waged the war, who made such big promises of "support for the troops" will CUT veterans medical care, forget the dead and move on.

9. And the only people who will have benefitted will be those massive multi-national corporations -- oil and weapons manufacturers mostly -- who rushed in to profit off the death of all those innocent brown-skinned children lying in the rubble.

10. A couple more things:

The media (especially cable news) LOVES a war. They love the spectacle, the drama. It means big profits. It means eyeballs on screens. It makes stars of their anchors.

They will ask the wrong questions, they will follow militaristic talking points.

11. Cable news will try to EMPOWER the warmongers, by accepting rumors of impending harm to Americans as real news, by making stars of the "brutal enemies" handed to them by the Republican propaganda machine. You can practically see them salivate over the possibility for profit.

12. What will get lost in all this bickering and drama and tragedy and spectacle is the fact that all of this was AVOIDABLE.

That Trump inherited a reigned-in Iran, that he set in motion an escalation to war because he thought it would benefit HIM

Yep.