The WWII arms production helped lift us up out of a global Great Depression. From zero to Marshall Plan in less than a decade. There's your manufacturing base. So long as can keep the suicide bombers from reaching our shores in great numbers, we'll be the last one standing when the dust settles. That which couldn't kill us will have forced us to become stronger.

And when it was all over, that Great Depression seemed a little less horrible in retrospect. In the thirties, it felt like the end of the world. Then the forties came along. So it will be again. Our current job troubles will be forgotten, in the face of a much greater horror. And then that greater horror will be swallowed up in a new, wiser age of progressivism without illusion. But only so long as we thoroughly defeat the enemy, so they will be properly grateful for our subsequent benevolence. The aftermath of World War II was much better than that of World War I because the second time around, we finished the job, and because the second time around, we made the most of the opportunity to rebuild upon the ashes to an improved design.

Right now the shit's just hitting the fan, and the self-declared voices of reason are soiling their underwear as if it's the end or something. This isn't the end. It's the end of the beginning. We've been here before. We know the plot. (Oh, and wasn't Spain trying to make nice with the forces of evil last time, too?)

My only lament is that there's going to be a lot of pain and death, which might have been avoided if... well, there are too many ways to complete that sentence. If George Bush and Bill Clinton hadn't wimped out. If Spain hadn't wimped out. If we hadn't cut the United Nations so much slack all those decades. If we hadn't built all those oil rigs in Arabia., and then let the Arabs get away with nationalizing the oil industry we built for them. If we hadn't let them get away with that OPEC bullshit. If the voters in Spain had had more of a backbone. So many opportunities to abort the coming holocaust, all lost.

But it's too late now. The consequences of short term thinking, wishful thinking and complacency have snowballed. Before this is over, millions will be dead. Just like last time, and the time before. Why? Because people haven't learned, or have forgotten. Why, wasn't that fool Ashton blathering about balance of power? He hasn't even grapsed the lessons of World War One!

This time around, let's never let them forget. Let's rub their faces in it, as much as we can. Forever. Because if we don't, people will forget. And then, in another half century or so, it will all happen again.