Scripting News: Why we fight

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Why we fight

Cindy Sheehan was on Hardball last night, and said the most reasonable thing I've heard on news TV in a very long time, maybe ever. She said that the reason we're occupying Iraq is that it makes money for the people who run the country. Chris Matthews acted incredulous, and pressed her on it, almost ridiculing her. "Come on, do you really believe that?" may not have been his exact words but they were the sentiment he communicated.

This made me wonder about Matthews. Could he not believe it? Is he so much a Washington insider that he doesn't see it? Then I wondered about the people who read my blog.

Now that most of us are against the occupation, please, if you haven't already done so, watch the movie Why We Fight. Or if you've already seen it, do it again, and tell a friend. It's not very long, and it's certainly not biased. Most of the people they interview are Republicans, John McCain, for example. A former head of the CIA explains what blowback means. They interview the people who flew the first bombing mission over Iraq. A former analyst inside the Pentagon. They're not typical anti-war people, they're just telling the truth. You can tell because unlike all the crap you hear that passes for news and analysis, it has the ring of truth. It checks out, it makes sense.

We go to war because it's profitable.

But it doesn't make sense for most of us to support more war, because it may make us richer in the short term, in the long term (which is starting to be short term) it costs too much. It's against our interest.

I'm old enough to remember Vietnam, and after it was over, I was sure that we would not make the same mistake in my lifetime. Well, it seems we didn't learn the lesson well enough. It's too easy for us to go to war. We need to do something to end the Iraq occupation, to bring our forces home and regroup. And we have to, this time, learn not just the lesson of Iraq, but the lesson of having a government that's controlled by people who profit from war.

Chris Ceppi offers graphic evidence, Halliburton's 5-year stock graph.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:15 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Jun Aug