Beating the Drums of War

Here we go again.

With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums.

We’re told that we’re facing a new Hitler. That this is a “new axis of evil” and a “Cold War 2.0.” That if we don’t “forcefully confront” Putin, it’s “appeasement.”

I’ve covered nearly every major U.S. military action since the 1990s, and it’s always the same.

The talking heads on cable news are almost drooling over the prospect of a ratings-boosting war. Retired Pentagon officials on the payroll of the defense industry are presented as “experts,” often with no disclosure of their financial conflicts of interest.

And once the shooting starts, mainstream pundits will drop any remaining pretense of journalistic integrity and begin openly cheerleading for “the troops,” like sports announcers rooting for the home team.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer and it spends more on “defense” than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South

Korea, and Australia combined.

As co-founder of The Intercept, I guarantee that we will never surrender to the jingoistic media stampede. Our tenacious team of investigative journalists will interrogate every official claim, challenge the Pentagon’s spin, and never defer to the conventional wisdom of a foreign policy establishment that has been disastrously wrong over and over and over again.

Jeremy Scahill The Intercept

Washington, D.C.