Just What We Need: Another War
By Danny Schechter
New York, New York: Sound the bugle! Get the press to march along; we are going to war.
Again!
Enemies r 'us, and for a long time with the killing of bin Laden, a Jihadi fatigue had set in. With the apparent shriveling up of the Al Qaeda menace, America's threat-defining and refining machinery was somewhat adrift. What had been so simple, turned too complex to fuse into one soundbite.
Former Intelligence official Thomas Fingar, now of Stanford University, describes his own frustration in finding out what US policy priorities should be in national intelligence. He asked his colleagues to share the threats they worried about. He was soon inundated.
"When I was given responsibility for the process known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, almost 2300 issues had been assigned priorities higher than zero, " he explained. "My first instruction was, "Reduce the number."
He knew they needed only one bad-ass enemy to focus fears and attract appropriations to fight. He had too many threats to respond to. They had to go.
Now, he and the Administration have that new bad guy.
Political scientist/analyst Michael Brenner says Washington is in an ISIS panic:
"The grotesque beheading of James Foley is stirring passions in Washington policy circles. From the highest levels of the Obama administration to the media pundits, emotions are flaring over what the United States should/could do. The act in itself has changed nothing insofar as IS' threat to the United States and its significance for Middle East politics are concerned. It is the mood that has been transformed. Irresistible impulse is displacing cool deliberation. The flood of commentary, as usual, reveals little in the way of rigorous logic but much in the way of disjointed thinking and unchecked emotion."
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