Insanity on a Mass Scale
APR 25, 2026
Courtesy of NBC News, here’s a brief summary of the butcher’s bill of the latest wars in the Middle East:
Iran’s forensics chief said nearly 3,400 people had been killed in the country since U.S.-Israeli strikes began Feb. 28. Almost 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, 32 have been killed in Gulf states, and 23 have died in Israel. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and two more died of noncombat causes.
I happen to believe Iranian lives are as valuable and precious as American lives. What gives the U.S. and Israeli governments the right to inflict such disproportionate casualties on Iran, on Lebanon, on Gaza? (I know: might makes right.) If you include the Palestinians, more than 100,000 people, and probably closer to 200,000, have been killed in the latest Israeli/U.S. wars, with the United States providing most of the deadly weaponry.
Speaking of weaponry, the liberal New York Times had an article yesterday lamenting the heavy expenditure of costly precision weaponry (like Tomahawk cruise missiles) by the U.S. since the beginning of the Iran War. Nowhere in the article was there a complaint about the death toll, nor was there much of a complaint about the cost. No—what the liberal New York Times was concerned about was how quickly the U.S. could replenish its stockpile of weaponry so it could be prepared for a future war against peer threats like China and Russia.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the US stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.
The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.
The Iran war has significantly drained much of the US military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries such as Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.
Again, if you read the article, nothing is said about morality. Nothing is said about death and dying and the bloody awfulness of war. The article simply says the U.S. has used a lot of very expensive missiles that we MUST replace if we’re to be prepared to wage more wars in the near future.
There’s not even a hint here that maybe America could be at peace—even in the most distant future. Apparently, America must always remain locked and loaded for a war with China, or Russia, or some other country and combination of countries, even as all this is couched as defending the homeland.
How many war crimes can be hidden or explained away by this phrase: “defend the homeland”? Far too many, and of the most horrific nature.
American militarism must end. Support of Israeli warmongering and killing must end. The national love affair with weaponry must end. Cut the Pentagon budget by 50% and keep cutting. Retrench the empire and recommit to being a republic that doesn’t seek war. Turn away from the bloody awfulness and waste of constant warfare.
War isn’t macho. It isn’t glorious. It’s insanity on a mass scale.
Bracing Views 
Dear Bill,
For a timelier and more topical response, and given the chaotic situation in the Middle East, please allow me the pleasure of resonating with your current post entitled “The Bloody Awful Waste of War” as follows:
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
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Thanks. Powerful cartoon.
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For generations already (even before my lifetime), the U.S. economy is coincident with the war economy (or military-industrial complex). The so-called peace dividend that appeared (promised only) then evaporated in the 1990s was a head fake. Also, as Neil Postman once remarked, patriotism is a sordid emotion. I’ll add that it’s also ubiquitous, which is why the NYT‘s failure to say anything remotely peaceful or moral in relation to this year’s new war with Iran should not be so surprising. Patriotism and its reflexive war boosterism if the water we swim in and the air we breathe. It’s like mother’s milk.
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For a good example of blameworthy legacy news-media manufacturing public consent for an unethical and immoral bloody invasion and occupation, one need only consider the neoliberal New York Times helping create the Iraq War — a ‘war’ that was blatantly unjust and essentially one-sided in firepower — through then-VP Dick Cheney’s anonymous and knowingly-false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. (By “neoliberal” I mean progressive in regard to basically following “woke” ideology: that of race, sexuality, gender and gender-bending.)
After the severe damage was done, the Times claimed honest-ignorance innocence on the grounds that it was its blogger’s overzealousness that was really at fault. The same Times that otherwise insists upon securing the non-publishable yet accurate identity of its writers’ anonymous information sources.
Also, quite memorable was popular Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show (May 29, 2003), where he ranted about the war’s justification and supposed success:
“… And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, uhm, and, uh, uhm, take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble. And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said ‘we’ve got you’ this bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between us and you because we don’t care about life, we’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your hummers.
“… And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, uhm, and basically saying which part of this sentence don’t you understand. You don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy we’re going to just let it go, well suck on this. Ok. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq, because we could. And that’s the real truth.”
Potential translation: ‘Just to be on the safe side, let’s error in favor of militarily assaulting, invading and devastating Iraq, then likely looting their untapped fossil fuel reserves.’ … What astonishes me is how such pro-War news-media professionals can afterwards sleep at night or look their little children/grandchildren in the face everyday.
But, from another perspective, the Times may have jumped on the atrocity-prone Iraq-invasion bandwagon due to their close proximity to the massive 9/11 blow the city took only a few years prior. And there was plenty of that particularly bitter bandwagon going around in Western circles back then.
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The militarists at the top never think of the human beings on the scene of war. Even the phrase “boots on the ground” avoids it. McNamara in looking back at Vietnam said that all in DC including himself were obsessed with containing Communism and could never see the civil war that was involved. As Westmoreland kept asking for more troops, his requests were granted even though bodies were coming home. LBJ in a bizarre comment that avoid loss of life said that in Vietnam, “we’ve got to nail the coonskin on the wall.”
I salute those involved in selecting the design for the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, the first such monument that truly speaks to war both in appearance and in naming every one of the Americans who died. Not mentioned, of course, are the 2 million Vietnamese who died.
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Dear clif9710,
Thank you for your comment. I would like to add that there were not two but three millions Vietnamese casualties, as far as I can recall. Official 1995 estimates from Vietnam reported roughly 1.1 million North Vietnamese/Viet Cong fighters and up to 2 million civilians killed.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅
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BTW: Actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan postulated that “Of the four wars in my lifetime none came about because the U.S. was too strong”; however, who can know what may have historically come to fruition had the U.S. remained the sole possessor of atomic weaponry?
It seems the U.S. nevertheless expects the international community to accept that an American presidency would never initiate a nuclear-weapons exchange. But how can that be known for sure, especially with morally/ethically corrupt U.S. foreign-policy and war-mongering history?
After U.S. President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the forces warring with North Korea — for the latter’s remarks about using many atomic bombs to promptly end the war — Americans’ approval-rating of the president dropped to 23 percent. It was a record-breaking low, even lower than the worst approval-rating points of the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.
Had it not been for the formidable international pressure on Truman (and perhaps his personal morality) to relieve MacArthur as commander, Truman may have eventually succumbed to domestic political pressure to allow MacArthur’s command to continue.
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Well Bill, Guess you are not a billionaire member of our own and very profitable “DEATH” INDUSTRY.
We don’t need no stinkn’ Health Care…
Or affordable housing…
Or solvent Social Security.
We would much rather have another WAR
Jerry King
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It is possible to have some restraint on the Dept of War and Sec of War by reducing money available to Pentagon….
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/congress-rescind-money-iran-war
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It’s bewildering how so many politicians can live with themselves, let alone sleep well at night, and even attend religious services seemingly in good conscience — especially those faiths that teach utmost compassion and charity.
.
Politics is ‘the art of compromise’
politics at its moral peak
though this moral peak
indeed lies below a dead sea’s level,
but the compromise of ethics, morals
thus human(e) integrity is politics
at its natural successful state
—a state in which the media beast
must be fed, will feast from
the politicians’ tin can
filled with naught but the spin man
of and for the political animal.
.
As for the human species itself, along with our ‘intelligence’ comes a proportionate reprehensible potential for evil behavior, e.g. malice for malice’s sake. [It’s worth noting how unusually nice people with, for example, Down Syndrome are — all to their credit, of course — when compared to the average and high(er) IQ population.]
With our four-legged friends, however, there definitely is a beautiful absence of that undesirable distinctly human trait. While animals can react violently, it is typically due to reactive distrust/dislike or necessity/sustenance. But leave it to us humans, with our greater ‘thinking’ capacity, to commit a spiteful act, even if only because we can.
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