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Bouvard on Sovereignty and Anti-War Rhetoric

X / Twitter · Jan 03, 2026 · 1 min read

All those (former?) Trump supporters who though he promised "no more wars" cannot possibly have heard what they think they heard. No sovereign could ever promise he will not go to war, and he would be stupid to do so because that would be the best way to guarantee lots of war.

The convergence of right wing with left wing vilification of the Iraq War as the MOST DISASTROUS FOREIGN POLICY DECISION EVER MADE was so successful that wiped out, along with any vestige of memories of how deposing Saddam Hussein came to seem worth considering, vast swathes

of basic understanding of the world, why there are wars, how power is exercised, etc. It turned a large part of the population into NPCs perpetually muttering "no more endless wars." Trump just opposed the kind of wars that involved open-ended commitments with uncertain outcomes

and no clear benefits--rather than, say, wars where you kill or capture an enemy, ensure a sufficiently friendly (or chastened) regime, procure the material benefits that made the place relevant in the first place, and then move on. Those kinds of wars may turn out not to be so

simple themselves, but things can always go wrong--the less invested you are the less it matters. We might be getting a picture of how Trump might have dealt with Saddam Hussein--take him out, find a general we could work with, make an oil deal, move on. You can learn from this

or whine endlessly about being betrayed when you were only betrayed by your own delusions and maybe. propaganda pumped into the system for decades (all the "right wing" critiques of Iraq are downstream of The Nation editorials from 2004).

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