Monday, May 13, 2019

Is the dog starting to wag?

Prediction: Donald Trump will get us into a new shooting war.

If the hounds of justice in Congress, the Senate,  the New York Attorney General's office, and others get any closer to Donald Trump's many possible transgressions — or if, as is possible, Trump's tariff war with China plunges us into a recession and stock market crash — I predict he will try to throw everybody off the track by starting a shooting war somewhere in the world.

He will claim that the country must unite behind him because America is "under attack." Those who join him will be declared patriots. The rest will be called traitors. There are already signs that he's looking for a fight in Iran with which to wag the dog.

If he does this, tens of thousands of people will die, including thousands of Americans, so that Trump can have his distraction. (Another possibility for a create-your-own-war is North Korea. As is Venezuela.) If we get two wars at once, say Iran and Korea, don't be surprised if Trump reinstates the draft.

This is one of the shortest pieces I've ever posted here.

It's also the scariest.

5 comments:

Victor said...

Starting a draft would be too fucking dumb even for a bigoted/stupid/ignorant motherfucking mental midget like tRUMP!
Maybe...

Right now it's a volunteer military, too many Americans, upon learning of deaths of our military people think, "Hey, they knew what they were getting into! Too bad, though..."

But if people had family members, friends, or themselves, with lives on the line, we might very well see a backlash against all of the stupid wars and military interventions we've gotten into since transitioning from a drafted military, to a volunteer one.

If we had a draft, people might not been so easily pawned into the Iraq War.

Comrade Misfit said...

Two days after your post and it sure seems that Trump/Bolton (two GOP draft-dodgers) are trying to gin up a war with Iran.

This time, few other nations are willing to tag along.

Procopius said...

As Victor says, Trump is not going to be able to get the draft started again. He would need Congressional approval, and that isn't going to happen. Actually, if we want to have our empire we need to find some way to force more young men to join the Army. I think that's one of the reasons the elite are destroying the middle class. They need to make the reserve army of the unemployed hungry enough that they will see military service (for 15 years or more) as their best option. The generals really, really don't want a draft. They saw what it did to their army during Vietnam. You can have conscription during real wars of defense, but when you want to use your army as a tool of conquest those conscripts are going to be unhappy campers and their friends and relatives back in the States are going to hear about it. It's much easier with a "volunteer" army which is less than 1% of your population. The trade-off is that you can't invade countries like Iran, which has a population of 81.6 million patriotic, determined people.

Buttermilk Sky said...

I've lost track -- are we still in a state of "emergy"?

The New York Crank said...

We're in perpetual state of "emergy," Buttermilk.

Yours crankily,
The New York Crank