War just for the sheer enjoyable fuck of it isn’t what it used to be

Matt Taibbi considers The Cure for the Iraq War Hangover and wonders how much the post-Iraq period is going to suck.

The post-Vietnam era was bad enough. Indeed, that whole Indochina adventure was a perfect preview of the modern American habit for failure. We showed up in Southeast Asia, killed two million or so people, sprayed half the Vietnamese peninsula with deadly chemicals, then pulled up suddenly and went home to spend the next 20 years or so making soft-lit, woe-is-us movies about how depressing it is to buy a Mexican hooker when your legs don’t move….

Our enemy didn’t even have China or Russia backing them this time. They were just a bunch of sneaky guys with beards, and they whipped a country with a $600-billion defense budget, a country that ruled the sea lanes and had its foot on the neck of international capitalism. Who could we possibly blame for this one?

Round up the usual suspects.