{"id":55984,"date":"2025-11-04T06:40:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T14:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=55984"},"modified":"2025-11-04T06:40:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T14:40:03","slug":"war-and-rumors-of-war-and-dick-cheney-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/04\/war-and-rumors-of-war-and-dick-cheney-is-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"War and Rumors of War (and Dick Cheney Is Dead)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

War and rumors of war dominate the headlines. Venezuela. Nigeria. Iran. Somalia. A \u201cnew Cold War\u201d involving Russia and China. What are we to believe?<\/p>\n

The events of the 62 years of my short life (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, peace dividends that never arrive, military budgets that keep soaring, U.S. domination of the world\u2019s weapons trade, the National Security State as America\u2019s fourth and arguably most powerful branch of government, and on and on) make me highly suspect of official narratives about any war, especially as those same Pentagon budgets soar and those same arms exports keep flooding the world in the (false) name of democracy.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, warmongers in our country continue to shout and bray for more war. Those who make the most noise are typically the furthest from the fighting. Typically, the closer you are to the fighting, the more you want it to stop. Especially if you\u2019re doing the fighting. Consider Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front.\u201d When the main character, Paul, a frontline grunt, goes home on leave, he realizes the blood-thirstiness of the REMFs is far different from the war he\u2019s seeing at the front. (REMF, rear-echelon mother-fucker, is a colorful and meaningful military acronym.)<\/p>\n

Often those who talk about war use the most bloodless expressions. So, for example, I\u2019ve read that Ukrainians must \u201cprosecute their war of defense,\u201d helped by generous supplies of American-made weaponry. When I think of war, I think of the concrete. Blasted bodies, a poisoned environment, disease, dead animals, PTSD and TBI, moral injury, atrocities and war crimes (because wars always produce atrocity), and so on. Phrases like \u201chelp Ukraine prosecute their war of defense\u201d strike me as Orwellian in the sense of his classic essay on politics and the English language. It sounds good and noble, but how ready are those who support Ukraine to join the cause in the trenches?<\/p>\n

An American president now speaks of \u201cthe enemy within\u201d and city streets as a training ground for U.S. military action. When everything is war, nothing is safe as the worst crimes and atrocities become possible.<\/p>\n

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As a young man, Cheney had \u201cother priorities\u201d than serving in the U.S. military. Later, the further he was from battle, the more hawkish he became.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Postscript: As I was writing this, I learned that Dick Cheney has died<\/a> at the age of 84. NBC News described him as the \u201cIraq war architect,\u201d as if he was a highly skilled and creative builder instead of a war criminal. A reader sent along a BBC headline that suggests there was \u201cfaulty\u201d intelligence leading up to the Iraq war in 2003, as if Cheney had no hand in manufacturing a malicious and mendacious narrative of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.<\/p>\n

Even warmongers like Cheney, proud of their mailed fists, get treated and fitted with kid gloves by a fawning media. Of course, Cheney, when he had an opportunity to serve in Vietnam, famously said he had other priorities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Maybe the American people, collectively, need to say we have other priorities<\/strong> than waging war around the globe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author\u2019s permission. War and rumors of war dominate the headlines. Venezuela. Nigeria. Iran. Somalia. A \u201cnew Cold War\u201d involving Russia and China. What are we to believe? The events of the 62 years of my short life (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, peace dividends that never arrive, military budgets that […]<\/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-55984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55984","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=55984"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55988,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55984\/revisions\/55988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55984"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=55984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}