More fun to sink them by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

I’m not giving up, but I am feeling done in.

In the evenings, I’m distracting myself by watching The Diplomat for the second time. Perhaps an odd choice, but then again, maybe not. With its focus on avoiding war with Iran, it is chillingly relevant. The characters below the level of president and prime minister actually know what they’re talking about and are smart enough (keyword: smart) to manage to control their bosses’ blustering, moronic chest thumping. They want to blow things up to prove they can and to convince the voting public that they are not weak or too old for the job.

On Monday, speaking to an audience (as in audience with the king) of House Republicans, Trump said: The Navy is gone. It’s all lying at the bottom of the ocean. Forty-six ships, can you believe it? In fact, I got a little upset with our people. I said, ‘What quality of ship?’ ‘Excellent, sir, top of the line.’ I said, ‘Why don’t we just capture the ship? We could have used it? Why did we sink them?’ He said, ‘It’s more fun to sink them.’”

The audience laughed. Sickening. Also—what a surprise—stupid. Will Play Well at the Hague reads the headline in the HuffPost. And when I searched for “it’s more fun to sink ships,” nothing came up from the U.S. mainstream media. Again, not a surprise. but deeply disturbing.

What did surprise me, as I dug around doing research for this piece, was what motivated Pete Hegseth to volunteer to serve in Iraq. It was:

… an article about an insurgent who blew himself up, killing 18 Iraqi children. “To me, that was the face of evil,” Mr. Hegseth told The Princeton Alumni Weekly… Today, Mr. Hegseth describes the mission and moral purpose animating the war in Iran, now in its second week, in starkly different terms. The goal, he said recently, is to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Instead of seeking justice, U.S. forces are pursuing vengeance against an implacable foe. — The New York Times

Apparently, blowing up children no longer troubles him.

This is from The Daily Beast:

At Tuesday’s war briefing, Hegseth read aloud President Trump’s threat on Truth Social regarding what Iran will face if its surviving regime seeks to stop shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. “Death, fire and fury will rain upon them.”

And again from The New York Times:

(Hegseth’s) diagnosis of the military’s shortcomings is one that often emerges after a lost war. “There’s always someone who thinks that if only we were crueler, if only we’d killed another million Vietnamese, then we would have won this war,” said Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war. “If you reduce war to the satisfied feeling you get when you kill the enemy, it makes it a lot simpler and more satisfying.”

“I will rain hellfire upon them.”

That’s neither Trump nor Hegseth. That’s Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge talking about Iran in The Diplomat’s first season. As I said, chillingly relevant. It’s too bad the Wylers and Austin Dennison aren’t advising this administration. Watch the show if you want to know who they are. It will either depress you or cheer you. Or both.

You will certainly learn more about world affairs than you do from the mainstream media.