War is a toy for stupid and feeble-minded leaders.

Well, here I am again, less than a year after I wrote a variation of this same article, on the day after a reckless military attack by the United States against Iran, a weak basket case of a nation that poses no significant geopolitical threat to us. You know, the same country that Trump warned, 15 years ago, Obama was going to start a war against. I’m angry, disgusted, horrified, and annoyed, even more so than I was back in June, but one thing I’m absolutely not is surprised. Since Trump’s second election—before that, even—I’ve been predicting that he would take the United States to war, because that’s what all fascist leaders do when they get tired or bored of domestic politics. To people like Trump and his sycophants and enablers, war is nothing more than a toy they choose to play with when they need to shore up their flagging self-esteem or their loosening hold on power. They are far from unique with this propensity. What particularly enrages me is that almost no one seems able or willing to look back through history and even try to draw some useful lesson from the multitude of martial disasters in the past into which bellicose leaders have blundered, time and time again, to their and everyone else’s cost.

I won’t insult the intelligence of my readers by dignifying the proffered justification for this latest conflict—“We must stop Iran from possessing a nuclear weapon!”—by entertaining it seriously, because clearly no one who had a hand in this decision does. Clueless cretins like the odious John Bolton have been offering this pedantic thought-terminating cliché as an excuse to urge the conquest of Iran for literally 20 years now. The true reasons for war are much shallower and far more cynical. These men are overgrown boys playing with G.I. Joe figures and get a secret tingle in their privates by watching stuff blow up on CNN. They lack the intelligence, the wisdom, the experience, and the depth of thought capable of even understanding what military action means in a geopolitical or historical context, much less what it entails in a human sense. That we have put these infantile men in positions where they’re capable of making decisions like this is nothing short of an indictment of our entire society.