Hegseth is memeing us into a quagmire

Any historian will tell you that propaganda is part of warfare. One can see plenty of cartoons from World War II that made the Japanese look subhuman including Superman shorts. As a kid, I remember t-shirt makers using “The Simpsons” to make light of Desert Storm and Saddam Hussein. As a young man after 9/11 I was convinced that the perpetrators were simpletons who lived in caves. Whether we have won the war, lost it, or finagled our way out of losing it, the same themes emerged. Our enemy is subhuman and brutal might is the way to beat them.

Except they aren’t and it isn’t. And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is playing into the same trap with potentially even worse consequences. The war in Iran has been won, but evidently, we still need to fight it. Iran has been vanquished, but we still need to spend a billion dollars a day to fight them. Iran’s navy has been decimated, even though no one expected them to be a threat. Their air force has been defeated although they have been flying antiquated jets from Top Gun.

Even more concerning is the fact Hegseth is selling us on metrics to convince us that Iran can’t fight back. Relying on quantitative observations either alone or as a primary metric is known as the McNamara fallacy. Robert McNamara, Defense secretary in the 1960s, relied on body counts and ordinance to sell that the war in Vietnam was going well. Donald Rumsfeld, Defense secretary during the Iraq War, fell into the same trap when trying to convince Americans that Iraq was not a quagmire. You would think that at some point we would learn our lessons.

I mean,........

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