Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
Lew Rockwell makes an excellent point in a May 6 piece ("The Glory of War," lewrockwell.com) about how people in the this great land of ours tend to jump whenever they are told to:
The bloom on the rose of war eventually fades, leaving only the thorns. By the time this takes place, most everyone has already begun the national task of averting the eyes from the thorns, meaning the awful reality, the dashed hopes, the expense, the lame, the limbless, the widows, the orphans, the death on all sides, and the resulting instability. The people who still take an interest are those who first took an interest in war: the power elite, who began the war for purposes very different from that which they sold to the public at the outset.
Thus does the American public not care much about Iraq. It is not quite as invisible as other nations that were the subject of national obsessions in the recent past. Hardly anyone knows who or what is running El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Libya, Serbia, or Somalia, or any of the other formerly strategic countries that once engaged national attention.
In fact, the president of Nicaragua, Enrique Bolanos (never heard of him, huh?) is visiting the White House next week in hopes of soliciting support for the upcoming election, which could prove to be dicey since the old US nemesis Daniel Ortega is running and gaining some support on a consistently anti-US platform. Should he win, one can imagine the White House swinging into high gear about how Nicaragua is harboring communists, er…terrorists. Or maybe not. Maybe he will rule the country and never make a headline. It is all up to the state.
