You can’t see ideology because you live in it; you are the fish who wonders what water could be.

We’re going to war again. We’re going to war in Iraq again. And we’re going with no better idea of how to win or when to get out or what victory could mean than the last time. The media is beating the drum again. And the same set of characters– the exact same people– who were so terribly wrong last time are going on TV to be wrong again. People like me, just like last time, are not listened to at all. It’s funny. You hear people like Peter Beinart say things like “the age of intervention is over,” and you wonder what world they live in. Nothing has changed. Every disaster, every failure, every civilian lying dead in the sand. And nothing’s changed. Things are exactly the same.

Views like mine, in the world of American foreign policy, are considered extreme. This is because I believe that peace is preferable to war, that the last half-century of American warmaking has in the main been a series of disasters, and that this country’s political class has become so bent on war in the face of any and all challenges that those we call doves are just quieter hawks. I can envision no plausible scenario in which this country stops its endless projection of military force. Not in my lifetime. I suppose I hope only that people in the media will someday be honest and say: we are bent on war, and our media is bent on war, and there is no such thing as an anti-war voice in our politics or media, and we will go to war again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

We might “win,” this time. We will certainly destroy ISIS if we set our minds to it. And we will leave behind another failed state, whether after a year or ten, and then that failed state will do what failed states do, and we will go back again. But every time a little weaker, a little more vulnerable, until someday at last, the next war is the one that leads to our own destruction.

Before wars comes warmongering — old white men, stentorian, at peace, aggressive, self-confident, committed, serious, unconcerned, righteous, sure. And then after wars, little old ladies wash the bodies.