{"id":2754,"date":"2010-10-31T15:49:00","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T19:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=2754"},"modified":"2010-11-24T09:47:24","modified_gmt":"2010-11-24T14:47:24","slug":"ahmadinejads-birthday-gift-to-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/10\/ahmadinejads-birthday-gift-to-us.html","title":{"rendered":"Ahmadinejad\u2019s birthday gift to us"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ahmadinejad's<\/a>
Happy Birthday Mahmoud (created by Tim)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad celebrates his 55th birthday this week.\u00a0 The State Department thinks he should celebrate by releasing the two imprisoned American hikers<\/a> he is still holding in custody.\u00a0 While that’s a nice thought, it’s hard to imagine him gifting the U.S. such a present.\u00a0 Although, he may be inadvertently providing an even larger gift to our entire country\u2014justification for war<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why is provoking war a gift?\u00a0 Primarily because it could be the thing that rescues the economy from what is widely expected to be a slump lasting for several more years.\u00a0 After all, it was World War II that ultimately rocketed the U.S. out of the Great Depression.\u00a0 Examined carefully though, it’s clear that it wasn’t war, per se, that ended the Depression.\u00a0 Rather, it was what amounted to a massive government stimulus<\/a> injected into the lagging economy to create the capability for war and then sustain the effort.<\/p>\n

In this light, it’s possible that the U.S. doesn’t need to actually launch a war.\u00a0 David Broder argues<\/a> in the Washington Post that it would be sufficient to prepare for one.\u00a0 However, the threat posed by Iran is not large enough to warrant any sort of Cold War style arms race.\u00a0 Minimally we’d need a large overseas deployment.\u00a0 This would mean\u00a0 hiring lots additional soldiers as well as equipping them, and paying all the companies the modern military depends on for logistical support.\u00a0 That might do the trick.<\/p>\n

It could reasonably be argued that if the government was going to take on that much additional debt that it would be more prudent to invest in domestic infrastructure, research to create innovations to be the foundation of the next business boom, or educating our children to be prepared to compete in the global market.\u00a0 While that may be true, the point is moot.\u00a0 There is no political appetite for domestic stimulus. The only spending which might be capable of garnering any sort of bipartisan support would be toward a war effort.\u00a0 If there’s one thing that could reunite the country in purpose, it would be war.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s time to drop the facade of the U.S. being the peaceable gentle giant.\u00a0 Maybe we should forget all that “talking softly” stuff and just focus on the “big stick”.\u00a0 Maybe it’s time to own up to what we really do well.<\/p>\n

Unless, of course, that’s not who we are and who we want to be.\u00a0 Maybe there’s something to be proud of beyond our capacity to kick butt.\u00a0 But if that were true, then we could agree on something more productive than military deployments.\u00a0 And it doesn’t seem we can.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday Mahmoud… to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He may be inadvertently providing a large gift to our entire country\u2014justification for war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[49,48,46,45,47],"class_list":["post-2754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-1930s-depression","tag-2010-economy","tag-ahmadinejad","tag-iran","tag-warmonger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2754"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2927,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2754\/revisions\/2927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}