It’s officially complete.

Somehow, it is now possible to intellectually marry war in the name neo-conservatism with war in the name of liberal humanaitarianism. I’m just going to call it neo-humanitarianism.

Now, I’m not a fan of neo-conservatism or humanitarian interventionism (although I’m not this negative on the latter). But I understand them as philosophical orientations to geo-political problems. And I suppose the backers of each ideology have always had some a few things in common, perhaps more than they were willing to admit: a sense of self-righteousness, an ignorance of the theory of unintended consequences, and a pair of rose-colored glasses.

But any attempt to describe an individual war of choice as somehow fulfilling the desires of both theories, that’s insane. Or the definitions have just become so vague as to be meaningless. Newspeak.

More interesting to me is the idea of public desensitization to war. Not to harp on Orwell, but the first thing I thought of on Friday was  how little of the public discussion space all of this was taking up. Think back to the Gulf War buildup, fall 1990 and winter 1991. Make that the origin point, with time going forward on the X axis and public discourse on the Y. This function not only has a negative slope, but the second derivative is negative, too, right?

Seriously, how much longer can it be until we are at war with Eastasia?

Once upon a time, I used to be mildly embarrassed to admit that my foreign policy ideology most closely resembled Quaker Pacifism, and consequently manifested itself as isolationism. But not anymore.  And I guess there’s a silver lining that more people must have woken up today than yesterday and fancied themselves foreign policy realists (a positive second derivative!). I’ll take that over this eight days a week.

But it’s cold comfort indeed.