America’s new war: Chicken hawks all over again

March 3, 2026

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

There’s always terrific excitement when we bomb the shit out of somebody. We lounge on our comfy recliners and watch the bombs land and blow up buildings and war facilities on our TVs.

We hear about precision successes without too many deaths while some guy in a tight suit who looks the part and has an American flag pin in his lapel praises our military and our troops and appears grim and stoic as he tries to explain why we are bombing the shit out of somebody, and he becomes surly and maybe nasty if somebody from the press corps pushes too hard for answers. Then he praises the stars and stripes and God before he stalks off with reporters yelling at him.

This new guy actually mentioned this new war as biblical.

There are those in America today pounding their chests and strutting around with grand hubris at our military might and aggression. Boy, are we tough! Remember Operation Iraqi Freedom? At least we had a warm-up and some international cohesion before that ultimately stupid and senseless endeavor.

Remember the cheer leaders? Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Every Sunday one or the other was on TV taking turns explaining how we needed to go to war to avoid war in the future and lied like professional white-collar felons cheating on a lie detector test—so smooth and calm and concise and convincing—about supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Like good actors from the Actor’s Studio in New York City.

We’re talking chicken hawks in full flower.

Only Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was a military veteran and he was a pilot and as deranged an egomaniac as Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. And, after bombing Iraq and routing their 4th- rate army,  there was President Bush on a navy ship boasting about victory when the real shit was just about to torture us and kill American boys for years to come.

Now we have a new group of blowhards repeating the same garbage while lying and obfuscating, and, if needed, bullying anybody having the temerity to question their motives, policy or end game. What we have is a puffed up amateur draft dodger in charge of the most powerful weaponry in the history of the world wasting it on still another stupid and senseless war with nightmare potential.

Chicken hawks all over again. Pledging our supposedly limitless arsenal to at least four more weeks of titanic bombing. The ghastliness of what is to occur is beyond frightening.

Meanwhile, the same old voices are telling us what they think we want to hear—that in the end things will end up just great for America. Only this time we will not put “boots on the ground.”

No, this time we will bomb a despicable country into such submission that eventually the people will overcome a fanatical theocracy backed by a brutally repressive military and form a new government similar to America’s.

Regime change? Democracy?

A policy doomed by history, but who reads history when you have a president who doesn’t like to read books because he already knows the answers by instinct. He admits a few people might die, but of course they’ll die for a just cause and go down in history as heroes.

He is surrounded by office warriors who have no experience in combat or basic military service. They are above all that.

Lindsay Graham and his fellow reckless senators are pounding the war drums. Fox News is in grand celebration. Trump’s non-serving sons are all in while getting richer and richer. Meanwhile, those  rough and tough real estate barons are toadying up to Putin.

Maybe, big blustering threatening Chief Chicken Hawk should have read Colin Powell’s book and the part when the then secretary of defense came out of a meeting with chicken hawks Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and mentioned to highly decorated combat vet and fellow general Dick Armitage something about those guys having “never been in a good bar fight.”

Chicken hawks all over again.