As Though We Need Another Reason to Ditch the F-35

Listen up, this is serious.   The American Warfare State, the very one that any country buying the F-35 is signing on to serve, has achieved a degree of madness that we cannot afford to overlook.   This much is plain from details emerging of a course at the Pentagon's Joint Forces Staff College that taught America's future military leaders that American security required total war on Muslims, all of them.  They've been advocating genocide, mass extermination.

"The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists...  Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

"The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class."

...The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

"For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.


“'We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’ Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies.

“'It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.

That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”

If you find this shocking, you shouldn't.   It's the very sort of thing that some, like retired US Army Colonel turned professor, Andrew Bacevich, has warned of in books like his "The New American Militarism."   America has descended into a true "warfare state" -  a hellspawn of neoconservatism, evangelical fundamentalism, and corporate warfighting/military industrialism -  in which military subordination to the country's political leadership, including its executive branch, has become subverted.   This is merely one example of America's military leaders taking upon themselves planning and policy-making even going to annihilation of civilian populations.

We need to be distancing ourselves from this maniacal, messianic militarism and that absolutely mandates rejecting the F-35 and all its dire implications for Canadian foreign policy.