What Happened to the Postwar Dream?

"We have this wonderful capacity in America to Hitlerize people. We had Hitler, and since Hitler we've had about 20 of them. Khrushchev and Mao and of course Stalin, and for a little while Gadhafi was our Hitler. And now we have this guy Ahmadinejad. The reality is, he's not nearly as powerful inside the country as we like to think he is. The Revolutionary Guards have direct control over the missile program and if there is a weapons program, they would be the ones running it. Not Ahmadinejad."--Seymour Hersh in an interview published Friday with Der Spiegel.

The march to war in Iran continues unabated. Well, actually according to Sy Hersh, the original rationale behind the march to war in Iran was completely abated--to the point of being abandoned. Nevertheless, the administration has a new rationale because no one was going to buy the WMD bait and switch again.

So are we supposed to buy into the shifting rationales for war approach again?

Is this a game?

Hersh thinks the White House thinks so.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where does this feeling of urgency that the US has with Iran come from?

Hersh: Pressure from the White House. That's just their game.

How does one play the game?

Well, since Les Enrages.Org houses the prestigious Pink Floyd University, let's consult with the cannon.

From "Have a Cigar":

And did we tell you the name of the game, boy/We call it riding the gravy train.

Today the conductor of the 'war-with-Iran' gravy train is John Bolton.

But why do we keep following leaders down this road? A similar question was posed by Professor Roger Waters directly to Margaret Thatcher on my favorite Pink Floyd album The Final Cut on the song "The Postwar Dream":

Should we shout/should we scream/what happened to the postwar dream?
oh maggie, maggie what have we done?

Here's some insights from Rolling Stone's review of The Final Cut:

The Final Cut began as a modest expansion upon the soundtrack of the film version of The Wall, with a few new songs added and its release scheduled for the latter half of 1982... Around the same time, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, irked by the unseemly antics of an Argentine despot, dispatched British troops halfway around the world to fight and die for the Falkland Islands... Out of the jumbled obsessions of the original Wall album, he fastened on one primal and unifying obsession: the death of his father in the battle of Anzio in 1944. Thus, on The Final Cut, a child's inability to accept the loss of the father he never knew has become the grown man's refusal to accept the death politics that decimate each succeeding generation and threaten ever more clearly with each passing year to ultimately extinguish us all.

The album is dedicated to the memory of the long-lost Eric Fletcher Waters, and in one of its most memorable moments, his now-middle-aged son bitterly envisions a "Fletcher Memorial Home for incurable tyrants and kings," one and all welcome, be they pompous butchers in comic-opera uniforms or smug statesmen in expensive suits. He presents a ghastly processional: "... please welcome Reagan and Haig/Mr. Begin and friend, Mrs. Thatcher and Paisley/Mr. Brezhnev and party.... And," he coos, "now adding color, a group of anonymous Latin American meat packing glitterati." With these "colonial wasters of life and limb" duly assembled, Waters inquires, with ominous delicacy: "Is everyone in?/Are you having a nice time?/Now the final solution can be applied."

Waters realizes that all the Neanderthals will never be blown away. What concerns him more is the inexplicable extent of fighting in the world when there seems so little left to defend. In "The Gunners Dream," a dying airman hopes to the end that his death will be in the service of "the postwar dream," for which the album stands as a requiem–the hope for a society that offers "a place to stay/enough to eat," where "no one ever disappears ... and maniacs don't blow holes in bandsmen by remote control." But Waters, looking around him more than thirty-five years after the war's end, can only ask: "Is it for this that daddy died?"

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Genration after generation the Thatchers and Boltons of the world order more Eric Fletcher Waterses off to die. Sure World War II was about Nazis and the Iraq War (and Iran Provocation) is about oil and contracts and petro-dollars. This is a major regression. The postwar dream was that the world could find a way to avoid annihilation even when war is defensive and easily justified. Our leaders are about to piss on the postwar dream over a war that's easy to avoid and difficult to justify.

Hersh is right. It's just games to them.

And by the way something, Jenna Bush, that is why we can't leave your dad alone. Not until his kind leaves the likes of Roger Waters's dad alone.

VIDEO: Pink Floyd - Postwar Dream

TAGS: Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, Iran, Seymour Hersh