isolationism as farce

William Astore is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and the kind of exacting, precice critic of war and the military inpooprial complex I like to read. He's got a good new essay, The New American Isolationism: The Cost of Turning Away from War’s Horrific Realities over at TomDispatch. Although not a wholly original idea, or perhaps because it's a commonly uttered theme--we're too removed from war to mount an effective opposition to it, this summation of the argument is especially effective.

Astore writes:

When you’re kept isolated from war’s costs, it’s nearly impossible to mount an
effective opposition to them. While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years,
may have sought to remove U.S. public opinion from the enemy’s target list, they
have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making
powers. Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney’s dismissive “So?” when asked
about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008.
So what if the American people are uneasy? The elites can always call on a
professional, non-draft military, augmented by hordes of privatized hire-a-gun
outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they’ve almost become
the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. These same elites encourage us to
“support our troops,” but otherwise to look away.