Americans betrayed?

Americans have been betrayed. Sooner or later Americans will realize that they have been led to defeat in a pointless war by political leaders who they inattentively trusted. They have been misinformed by a sycophantic corporate media too mindful of advertising revenues to risk reporting truths branded unpatriotic by the propagandistic slogan, "you are with us or against us."

What happens when Americans wake up to their betrayal? It is too late to be rescued from catastrophe in Iraq, but perhaps if Americans can understand how such a grand mistake was made they can avoid repeating it.
  Paul Craig Roberts article at Lew Rockwell

I could almost get behind this idea, except for one thing. Most of us who are voting age were around in the 60's and 70's when we played an all-too-similar scenario in Viet Nam, and around in the 80's when we found out about our government's propensity to intervene covertly in other countries affairs, supporting corrupt regimes and even death squads. Why would we have "inattentively trusted" the warhawks again? Why would we fall for the propaganda when we fell for it before and landed on our faces?

The media and the lying government officials may have misled and betrayed the voters who are under the age of 35, but the rest of us who bought it were willing participants. We don't get off the hook by pleading ignorance.

That said, the book Dr. Roberts is touting looks like it's probably pretty good.

In a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press, The New American Militarism, Andrew J. Bacevich writes that we can avoid future disasters by understanding how our doctrines went wrong and by returning to the precepts laid down by our Founding Fathers, men of infinitely more wisdom than those currently holding reins of power.

Review excerpt:

In this provocative new book, Andrew Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of Americans, conservatives and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism and utopian ideology--of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith in the universality of American values. This perilous union, Bacevich argues, commits Americans to a futile enterprise, turning the US into a crusader state with a self-proclaimed mission of driving history to its final destination: the world-wide embrace of the American way of life. This mindset invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of US policy. It promises not to perfect but to pervert American ideals and to accelerate the hollowing out of American democracy.