Krugman's column today (which is up to his usual standards) mines a nugget that must be pondered by all of us. He quotes Helen Thomas as saying in the fall of 2002 that she had never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war, adding that the current incumbent appeared to be the exception to that rule.
What kind of person actually wants to go to war? What kind of person casually accepts the death, the destruction, and the wanton cruelty that war inevitably engenders? Is such a person blind, callous, or some combination thereof?
There are few nations that ever actually want to go to war. While this nation has fought more than its share of wars, I have never really felt that it was such a nation. War is almost always sold to the American public as an unfortunate necessity. Except for the Confederacy in 1861 (an insurrection against the established govt of this nation), I cannot think of an instance in which war was sold in advance as a positive good.
There is, in other words, a fundamental disconnect between the basic philosophy of this nation and the basic philosophy of the current regime. This fundamental disconnect is finally starting to become apparent, and it will become even more apparent in the coming months. It is a fundamental task of every member of this site to do everything that we can to make this disconnect evident.