Framing: Cold sweat + DSM = Outrage

[gulliver]

I think most Americans got their first taste of cold sweat when the Army started reporting recruiting shortfalls. The prospect of a draft created a whiff of panic. Panic, combined with dawning evidence of foolhardiness and fraud can lead to outrage. People don't stay scared long without getting angry.

I think America needs another dose of cold sweat. The big picture Bush scenario is truly disastrous. People need to realize what Bush may have unleashed. They still don't get it.

It's not merely a waste of American lives. It's not merely a quagmire. It's not merely an incipient civil war in a country full of unvalued "ragheads." It's not merely a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars. It's not merely devastation of our all-volunteer military. It is not merely a loss of face, trust, and admiration as the former best loved country in the world. Bush has created an unmitigated disaster, and the potential is that America is well and truly screwed.

[Eloriel]

1. The potential is that America (the U.S.) is finished, actually

Or at least that was the very, very strong sense I had going in. I felt that if we pursued this war against Iraq, it would be "the beginning of the end" of the U.S. as we knew it.

I forget all about that intuitive sense I had in between reminders of it, like yours. I felt then, and still do, that it would probably be a measured, somewhat slow (but definite, inalterable) decline, and where it ends I'm not sure. At the time it felt like the U.S. could (potential, not certainty) ultimately cease to be as a nation.

And, you know, if we can't as a nation do a whole helluva lot better relative to the rest of the world than we have during at least the LAST half of the 20th Century (if not all of it and even before that), then our demise as I saw it back then really would serve the planet better, I'm sorry to say. That's not to say I wish it, I don't. As a child of GREAT privilege, being an American (vis a vis most of the rest of the world), I would much rather hang onto it. But I do realize our karma may catch up with us as a nation.