Donald Trump Is Beating the Drum of War

Get ready to resist

by ANDREW DOBBS

It is weird to be old enough to see history repeat itself. It’s especially out there when you aren’t even that old. I was in high school when the United States invaded Afghanistan, a freshman in college when we went into Iraq. Those two memories, however, taught me and others my age the unmistakable sound of the drums of war.

Once we’d lived to hear them we could read history in a new way, and they sounded through its pages. Someone who came of age in the post-Vietnam 1970s or the 1980s would have read those books or watched those films about the summer of 1939 or the spring of 1914 or the end of 1860 and wouldn’t have felt that tone ringing out.

But anyone who has seen what it looks like when a real war gathers its evils together can’t help but hear the pounding.

This week we heard it all again, and the sick sense it called up in the pits of our guts made it hard to focus on really anything else. The worst part of the distraction is that the opening shot may have rung out, but it looks more like a warm up than the contest to come. The drums are still building, they haven’t come close to their real crescendo yet.

What do they sound like? First comes the shock and outrage of some unpardonable offense by an enemy until then just annoying; now they are wicked and deadly. The breaking news sirens and the breathless this-just-in-ism of the coverage trigger an initial burst of national adrenaline.

This prompts all the serious, somber, responsible elements of the political class — that is to say, those individuals most invested in the imperial order — to begin the serious, somber, responsible insistence that Something Must Be Done.

The real sign that the drums are sounding is when the liberals really dig into the Do Something position. Risible old penis-skinned war fiends such as John McCain want to let slip the dogs over the dumbest shit, always.

When the Nicholas Kristoffs and the Clintons and the MSNBC set or their pathetic predecessors start to speak the magic words — “normally there’s nobody more anti-war than me, but … ” or “there’s nobody who’s been tougher on the president than me, but …” — the beat is unavoidable.

The elite consensus now joined we get then the flogging of the prophets. Every time a courageous and perspicacious few stand up and remind everybody of the last time we fucked everything up. They dare to imagine the lives of those who committed the capital offense of being born in a place we’ve decided to destroy.

The really dangerous among them go so far as to point out all the ways in which the United States or other imperial powers are much graver risks to human life and freedom and global peace and stability than this monster of the week could ever hope to be.

The liberals proudly lead the flogging, so geeked to be part of the tough guy club at last. They still can’t hold a candle to the real hardasses — they beat the shit out of the lefties or kill a few or throw them in jail. The liberals shake their head that such a terrible thing came to pass — they don’t support it at all, of course not — but people need to be Serious.

They need to set aside their “idealism” and live in Reality. They need to get with the program or the drums will be beat out on their asses.

While this is coming to pass the imperial state begins to perform its war dance. Ultimatums are made, and the beat drops when the emperor or his foreign minister announce that this other government no longer meets their minimum standards for continued existence.

Elections or other form of sovereign approval aside, the only vote that counts — the vote of the global capitalist order and its imperial head — has been cast against them. They can vacate or be destroyed. They never vacate.

Of course before this drop they perform the pantomime of international legality and constitutional legitimacy. They draw out starkly just how captive to imperialist interests the institutions of international law have really become, feigning deliberation over a decision that’s already been made.

To be fair, the imperialists reluctantly show off the true value of these bodies, the latent opportunity there for a venue where the exploited and marginalized of the world can join forces to resist our follies. They protest, and their protests are a rare moment of nobility in the whole thing. But the drums are irresistible, and even these bastions of global hope for a different future are incapable of slowing their acceleration.

This is also when, traditionally, the U.S. Congress shows the opposite character — its total inability to do anything that doesn’t reek of murder. Its fundamental, congenital obligation to evildoing for the sake of concentrated wealth shines through as the handful of principled men and women who got lost on their way through life and ended up wasting their time in those halls beat their heads against the drums and fail, always.

Bipartisan consensus congeals as one wing of the war party salivates and the other sheds self-righteous tears — the one is eager and proud, the other quietly resolved and full of sadness that this is The Thing That Must Be Done. This is why those of us who refuse to salute during the National Anthem do what we do. We remember these moments and it makes national pride embarrassing.

This time the drumbeat caught some folks off guard because the initial volley here was launched at Syria without international or congressional consultation, and this is giving us a new variety of liberal concern trolling — those who want to Do Something but who don’t think we should do it without all the normal bullshit.

Pres. Donald Trump and his villainous crew of budding war criminals assure us that they are putting together an international effort, and Senators Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer may be wagging fingers here and there but they are very clear that they will deliver a bipartisan vote for whatever disaster this democidal fascist clown decides he wants to dive into.

We’ll get the Cicero-esque floor speeches and the dramatic showdowns at the United Nations with earpieces and all — don’t feel cheated, liberals. This attack this week was just a warm up, remember.

This brings us to the very bad news and the almost good news. The very bad news is that Trump is one of the truly most simple-minded and easiest manipulated figures in Western political history and he’s gotten a perfectly Pavlovian lesson this week that if he wants to be treated as a serious president worthy of respect all he has to do is take dramatic military action.