{"id":52331,"date":"2025-03-28T18:01:14","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T02:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=52331"},"modified":"2025-03-28T18:01:14","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T02:01:14","slug":"only-we-can-bomb-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/28\/only-we-can-bomb-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Only We Can Bomb It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Reprinted from <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.substack.com\/\">Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>President Donald Trump has promised to bomb Yemen for a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/news.antiwar.com\/2025\/03\/27\/trump-says-he-will-continue-bombing-yemen-for-a-long-time\/\" rel=\"\">long time<\/a>.\u201d Trump is a real president now. Presidents become \u201creal\u201d when they bomb something. Remember how Trump was praised by the U.S. mainstream media when he launched missiles against Syria in 2017?<\/p>\n<p>Back in 2017, <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.com\/2017\/04\/24\/spin-it-to-win-it-the-high-cost-of-trumps-military-strategy\/\" rel=\"\">I wrote this<\/a>: <em>The launch of 59 expensive cruise missiles against a Syrian airfield did little to change the actions of the Assad government. Nor did it knockout the airfield. Yet it was spun by Trump as a remarkable victory. In his <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/the-fix\/wp\/2017\/04\/12\/president-trumps-throughly-confusing-fox-business-interview-annotated\/?utm_term=.c1c324428ec7\" rel=\"\">words<\/a>, \u201cWe\u2019ve just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing. It\u2019s so incredible. It\u2019s brilliant. It\u2019s genius. Our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody by a factor of five. I mean look, we have, in terms of technology, nobody can even come close to competing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Only we can bomb it&#8221; should replace &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States_national_motto\" rel=\"\">In God we trust<\/a>&#8221; as the U.S. national motto.<\/p>\n<p>America\u2019s best and brightest (who were never quite that) have become the worst and dimmest. And that\u2019s true whether the president is blue or red, Biden or Trump. The problem is our \u201cleaders\u201d have no moral principles. No integrity. No sense of right and wrong. They\u2019re all about power and sending \u201cmessages\u201d through bombing. Or sending tons and tons of bombs to Israel so that the Zionists can send \u201cmessages\u201d to the Palestinians. The main message: begone or be dead.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cw2Kgz_2cBk?si=wCJmKbdjJ8BH0Zfe\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Even as our \u201cleaders\u201d do this, they seek to solidify a mythic history of the U.S. (see video above) where America is exceptional in its rightness and where they (the leaders) are the ones who grant us our rights (such as freedom of speech) when these rights are inalienable. Indeed, rather than protecting our rights, they want to control them, limit them, and make them obedient and subservient to power.<\/p>\n<p>Rulers\u2019 ideas rule. And our rulers\u2019 ideas are increasingly toxic.<\/p>\n<p>With democracy already deeply compromised in America, we\u2019re witnessing and experiencing the thrashing and lashing out of a declining American empire, not only externally but in the \u201chomeland.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Readers, what do you make of all this?<\/p>\n<p><em>William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), professor of history, and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is <a href=\"https:\/\/bracingviews.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow external noopener noreferrer\" data-wpel-link=\"external\">Bracing Views<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. President Donald Trump has promised to bomb Yemen for a \u201clong time.\u201d Trump is a real president now. Presidents become \u201creal\u201d when they bomb something. Remember how Trump was praised by the U.S. mainstream media when he launched missiles against Syria in 2017? Back in 2017, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[758],"class_list":["post-52331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"The U.S. Empire, Thrashing and Lashing Out as It Declines"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52334,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52331\/revisions\/52334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52331"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=52331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}