It's Déjà Vu All Over Again
Are we really doing this?
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One of my favorite writers is baseball legend Yogi Berra.
He’s arguably the most under-appreciated big leaguer in MLB history—he was a key component as a player on a record ten (!!!) World Series championship teams—and he also had a gift for unassuming, sometimes conflicting, and often silly (yet surprisingly insightful) turns-of-phrase that make you laugh and then get your mind whirring a bit.
One of his more famous utterances—affectionally called “Yogi-isms”—is softly disputed as originating from him, but I’m giving the credit to Mr. Berra because it’s my column and I can do that.
In 1961, his Yankees teammates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were in a home run duel on the way to breaking Babe Ruth’s single season record (Maris, of course, eventually did), and on several occasions, they hit back-to-back home runs in the lineup, which is, in itself, a rare event.
The story goes that after one of these occurrences, Mr. Berra quipped:
“It's déjà vu all over again.”
The phrase has popped into my mind repeatedly this week because if I don’t find a way to create a healthy distance from the existential morass of the current moment with gallows humor, the frustration and anger threaten to overwhelm me.
Somehow, folks, against all reason, we’re back to talking regime change. Yet again.
The United States was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades. Not only did our government fail to make the world safer from terrorism—let alone Americans—the costs of their incompetence will remain a black eye on our country’s reputation long after we’re all gone and buried.
As many as a million civilians, nearly 7,000 U.S. service members, and almost 1,500 coalition troops were killed. One study conducted by the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University estimates there were nearly 4 million indirect deaths as a result of the Global War on Terrorism.
As much as $8 trillion was spent total — enough to erase all medical debt in our country, wipe out all outstanding student loan debt, subsidize universal, free school lunches over the past two decades (and for the foreseeable future), comprehensively end homelessness, quadruple NASA’s budget every year for the next decade, and still have about $4 trillion left over.
And although the final analysis is complex, it’s fair to say Iraq and Afghanistan remain human rights quagmires and incubators for aspiring terrorists.
The Global War on Terrorism was objectively a failure. The things our government set out to accomplish were never close to being realized, the aftermath of their strategy led to massive and unnecessary and ongoing suffering, and the world is certainly less stable than it was on September 12th, 2001, let alone Sept. 10th.
I am not a pacifist, and I tend to believe, with all due respect, that pacifism is both well-intentioned and hopelessly naivë.
Evil does exist in the world, our country does contend with major national security threats, and we do need a strong military to protect us from those threats.
You ask me if I think Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear weapons, and my answer is of course not. The country’s despot, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei, has explicitly made clear, numerous times, his desire to destroy Israel.
He calls America “the Great Satan” and defends the chant “Death to America” as a supposedly fair critique of our country’s imperialist foreign policy but also claims it’s not something we should take as a threat to our collective safety, which—you’ll have to forgive me—I don’t quite buy as an explanation, much less comforting.
His country funds and otherwise supports numerous terrorist groups, among them: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, and Kata’ib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba in Iraq.
So, yeah, in normal circumstances, under competent leadership in the federal government, I would support limited U.S. airstrikes that destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and avoid killing innocent civilians.
But the nation’s commander-in-chief doesn’t read his security briefings, compelling staff to come up with the idea of using video explainers—as though spoon-feeding a cranky toddler—and is directly threatening the broad civilian population of Iran with massive, indiscriminate bombing.
He’s being advised by a Secretary of Defense who shares highly classified military intelligence in group chats with his family and personal lawyer, has been abandoned by most of his senior staff over the past several months due to a lack of confidence in his leadership, and seems far more preoccupied with the racial, gender, and sexuality characteristics of service members than anything else in his job.
They’re leading a military that is increasingly unhappy with how they’re treated by the Trump administration, who are wondering why their two biggest priorities this month have been (1) mobilization against civilians and (2) marching in a parade that was a proxy for celebrating the birthday of the commander-in-chief.
Congress, the people tasked with holding them accountable, currently controlled by Republicans, seem unable to articulate basic facts about Iran, let alone the contours of its foreign policy.
For that, look no further than yesterday when Senator Ted Cruz (R-Cancún) was taken to task by none other than Tucker Carlson (!!!) over calling for U.S. military action against Iran without knowing much of anything about Iran.
I’m not kidding. Watch this clip:
So, yes, while I readily acknowledge the national security threats posed by Iran and do not believe they should be permitted to develop nuclear weapons, I think trusting the current federal government to rationally negotiate this incredibly dangerous situation is, in itself, incredibly dangerous.
My fear is that we’re about to witness with Iran the same lackluster, enabling media coverage that—those of us who are old enough to remember—witnessed with the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq.
That this should follow a presidential campaign in which Donald Trump and the Republican Party incessantly claimed electing them would mean “no new wars” should be more than enough to give us all pause and question everything about this escalating disaster-in-the-making.
The lying, the bad intelligence, the incompetence, the lack of empathy for our military and their families and innocent civilians.
On several levels, we’ve seen this before.
It's déjà vu all over again.
Horrifying. This is what happens when you have idiots running the government.
Yes so scary! I second that! Thank you Charlotte for a great reporting today!! Tucker Carlson making good sense to me. Impossible!