War Is a Farce that Gives Us Preening

I take it as a given that it is not the event which is an outlier, but the reporting of it.  So while you are constructing your elaborate morality pyramid in which the United States, however compromised, however violent in pursuit of its policy aims, at least isn't [insert enormity], well, basically, fuck you, you are worse than wrong.  The argument that the institutional violence the US pursues, its endless supposedly accidental slaughter, is by dint of some extraordinary claims about good intentions not simply less objectionable than "terrorism" or whatever bargain-rack Hitler you are fixated upon at this particular timeslot in cable history, but actually supportable as some kind of legitimate force of opposition to the amateur depredations of the Qaddafis of the world is simply laughable.  We avail ourselves of our army of conquest in order to take all those al-Assads' places; we are not merely Saddam's executioners, but his executors; this is the conqueror's doom, and it is why all our endeavors on this bloody field are in the most classical sense tragic--they aren't just awful, but also inexorable.