David Corbin of Lopez Island, Washington had his perceptive comments expressed in the Monday, May 28 Memorial Day edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  They included some powerful visions of how we could achieve peace:

"We'll need to expend at least as much effort and expense as we've squandered on our wars.  Both as a nation and as individuals, we Americans will put our energies and our dollars, indeed our lives, into efforts for a better world.  If we have to go to war to create a better world, we are doomed to failure."

World War One was called "The war to end all wars."  World War Two saw 50 million people die and the discovery of the atom bomb, followed by nuclear power that gave mankind the means to destroy everybody and everything on the planet.

If we cannot face the reality of the doomsday potential we have now created, we will be racing to the long prophesied Armageddon end of the world scenario.  The threat of the military industrial complex singing the siren song of doom is heard as it seduces the ignorant while the gullible claim that another war will bring us closer to peace.

I have a problem with The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt.  I don't think they go far enough.  Instead of looking at the institutional frameworks for this lobby, they focus on personalities.  Identifying individuals is not enough.  This makes it impossible to understand the motivation of this lobby.  If they spent more time discussing the connections between Israeli hardliners and the US military industrial complex, I think they could spend less time trying to justify their case.  Follow that money trail and it is easy to demystify the tilt to Israel.

For a clear example of this marriage of convenience, look at the PNAC "Rebuilding America's Defenses" published shortly before Bush took office. This is the self-described "blueprint" for what became the Bush Doctrine.  The principal author was Thomas Donnelly. He is not an Israeli. He is not even Jewish.  However, he is Vice President for Strategic Development at Lockheed-Martin.  

Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.