The Mrs. Jellyby syndrome.

Here’s a good description of our Iraq misadventure:

America has made plenty of blunders as a global superpower, but the Iraq War was the worst. It was entirely optional, easily avoidable, strategically worthless, hideously wasteful, and far too often, morally compromising.

As bad as a mistake as Iraq was, in the moment it can be understood. The 9/11 attacks were a profound shock to the national psyche, and for years the nation remained paranoid that deadly enemies were everywhere and 9/11 would just be the prelude to future, much deadlier attacks. Not only that, but the national security state had not spent 20 years lying about Afghanistan then, and had not declared war on American conservatives as a class, so the need to distrust them was not quite as obvious.[1]

Our rage has dissipated since 2001 but the receding tide of rage did not expose anything noble or rational. A global American crusade of stupidity and viciousness gradually appeared but you have to be blind not to see the futility of it. Vicious Talibs abusing Afghan women were proof of a barbarism seemingly endemic in the Muslim world. Against which Bunny is but are such these things that ANYone can change and is it a unique US obligation to oppose and vanquish loathsome behavior wherever it can be found?

Our own nation has been subverted and cheapened on an immense scale and yet one hears nothing from the political elites making the case that there needs to be any balancing of priorities. It’s just assumed that foreigners come first under any and all circumstances. (And home-grown and imported minorities here at home too but that’s for later discussions.)

The clue that our World Crusade is off is in the question “what’s the missing part in all of this?” In slaying dragons in the Hindu Kush and Mesopotamia what were we NOT doing? Well, the political class was NOT fulfilling its responsibility to take care of our own people first. Oh, that! What a novel idea.

If you’ve ever known someone who is endlessly fixated on the needs of others you know that that is unhealthy behavior. As a commenter on some ZeroHedge article today observed, “we” are unwilling to spend $3B to pay for the completion of the wall on the southern border but sending something like $13B to Ukraine, so help me, to help them fight another war a long way away that doesn’t concern us is all in one morning’s work for the sell-out crowd.

You can see the problem. We have tens of thousands of U.S. troops in foreign climes dealing with primitives and their murky or unknowable ambitions, obsessions, and resentments BUT not a bleeping troop one on the U.S. border. It makes one weep or want to chew nails in absolute frustration, the betrayal shining like a bright star when you forget the foreigner. Compared to the endless sophistries and chest thumping about some distant Dogpatch the agenda of the diseased American political class and its yet-more-diseased billionaire controllers is abundantly clear. Not us.

Notes
[1] “The America First Movement has a Sean Hannity Problem.” By Darren J. Beattie, Revolver, 3/20/22.