Most of the wars fought during last the 30 years are the result of his former anti-sematic boss' weak-assed foreign policies.
Posted on 12/29/2014 3:15:56 PM PST by Timber Rattler
In mid-September, while President Obama was fending off complaints that he should have done more, done less, or done something different about the overlapping crises in Iraq and Syria, he traveled to Central Command headquarters, at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. There he addressed some of the men and women who would implement whatever the U.S. military strategy turned out to be.
(snip)
If I were writing such a history now, I would call it Chickenhawk Nation, based on the derisive term for those eager to go to war, as long as someone else is going. It would be the story of a country willing to do anything for its military except take it seriously. As a result, what happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. Outsiders treat it both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
'nuff said.
Chickenhawks are male homosexuals who prey on younger males.
It’s the same sort of underhanded smear as when patriotic Americans are called teabaggers.
I read the whole article and think the author correctly holds civilian leadership responsible for the results of our military misadventures. Our armed forces personnel are superbly trained and equipped to fight real wars: but “fix Iraq” and “fix Afghanistan” are not missions suited to our military, or to anybody else for that matter.
Most of the wars fought during last the 30 years are the result of his former anti-sematic boss' weak-assed foreign policies.
The uber-barf was not necessary. This is a well thought out article that will keep me thinking for a long time.
After the Moors were driven out of Spain, the Spanish monarchy found it now had a country full of soldiers and knights that had just spent 700 years fighting and defeating Islamic totalitarianism. The monarchy knew that these hardened fighting men would not lightly accept a home-grown version of a totalitarian state. Luckily, the New World had been discovered, and the Spanish King offered his military men land and great wealth if they just went to conquer and colonize Spain’s newest possession.
These never ending wars seem, to my untrained eye, like a way to keep our own knights outside of our borders so they cannot cause problems for our current monarch.
The American people are becoming chicken hawks.
Now that they won’t enlist and serve themselves, they have become super patriots, the military is now ‘just super guys, let’s buy them dinner and wave flags, genuflect to veterans’, but in the meanwhile that military has to offer take females and 42 year olds to get enough bodies to fill it’s fairly small numbers.
Americans are waving flags, but not joining themselves.
They are armchair patriots or armchair aggressors but they are not “chickenhawks”.
Americans use chickenhawk to mean men who support military actions, but who refuse to serve themselves.
Say it to the next 100 strangers you meet, and see how they define it.
Go to Austin and they will tell you that’s a teabagger and a neocon as well.
Chickenhawk as a faggot goes back to the 60s if not before.
Sorry, but you are the first person that I have ever heard of being confused about the dominate usage of “chickenhawk”.
It will take a lot more than this unexplained badgering to change how America uses the word.
Wiki says that chickenhawk (not “war hawk”) goes back to the New Republic in 1986.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(politics)
Wiki says the gay term was dated by Time magazine (in the 2000s) to at least the mid-70s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenhawk_(gay_slang)
It was a homosexual named Anderson Cooper who first chortled at calling TEA Party protesters “teabaggers”.
Underhanded (and to use THEIR word ‘homophobic’) slurs.
I understand that you have uncovered an obscure trivia question about unknown homosexual usage of the term chickenhawk a decade before it came to be used to mean what it means today , but nobody cares, I know I don’t.
chickenhawk is a fine term when used accurately, for instance for Mitt Romney.
This, for example:
A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them.
There are, as well, some 19.6 million living military veterans according to U.S. Census figures. This brings the total to roughly 22 million, not quite the 10% figure that Fallon cites regarding WWII but not exactly a demographic desert, either. If "we as a nation" don't know much about the military it's because "we as a nation" consist solely of East coast Beltway-savvy urbanites. This is hardly the case, but it explains the persistent air of mystery that pervades so many of the Atlantic's pronunciamentos on the topic.
A look at Fallows' graphic of 2000-2010 enlistments will illustrate my meaning. Except for northern Maine and rural Pennsylvania, there is a desert all right, and it's in military participation in the Northeast, most notably the urban Northeast. That's also where the articles are written and where national politics are driven. That's not quite QED but it's pretty revealing.
Tellingly, what Fallows uses to fill the knowledge vacuum is the arena of fiction, which has its own absurdities: Mash was, of course, about Vietnam but it was written, produced, and delivered by people who were never there and who were largely vehemently anti-Vietnam and even anti-military. That may be a lot of things but a fount of insight it is not.
More annoying still is Fallows' compression of our Iraq campaigns into a simple military defeat. That it was not. When Bush left office that country had had a police state and its tyrant overthrown, a massive decrease in violence, the oil resources we were accused (in the Atlantic) of expropriating back in Iraqi hands, and a representative, popularly-elected government that was independent enough to tell us to leave. That is, by the measure of our objectives entering the war, a victory. If now we have a fragmented government and an invasion by fantastically vicious terrorists, that is no doing of the U.S. military except perhaps by its absence. Iraq was not a military defeat (neither was Vietnam, but that's quite another posting), it was a political capitulation. Neither should be laid on the heads of the troops involved.
If "we as a nation", meaning the Atlantic and its readers, find "ourselves" dissociated from the military and shorn of accountability for its spending and its waste, the answer is to be found not in uniform, but in the political class that pretends simultaneously to be omniscient and bewildered. There's a dissociation there, all right.
In the fall of 1969, I was beginning my final year in college. As the months went by, the rock on which I had unthinkingly anchored my hopes—the certainty that the war in Vietnam would be over before I could possibly fight—began to crumble. It shattered altogether on Thanksgiving weekend when, while riding back to Boston from a visit with my relatives, I heard that the draft lottery had been held and my birthdate had come up number 45. I recognized for the first time that, inflexibly, I must either be drafted or consciously find a way to prevent it.
Excerpt...
Wow, he is slime, and weak.
Thank you - I read it too and wondered what I was missing that the original poster had decided merited a "barf". Far too many knee-jerkers here with those who mindlessly follow along w/o reading and thinking first.
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