Image by Zoshua Colah.

Here we go again. Another bombing, another military “response,” another foreign policy crisis framed in the language of necessity. The headlines are already there: U.S. Targets Iranian Militants After Escalation. Cable anchors dutifully speculate: “Will this spark a regional conflict?” Pundits from think tanks with Pentagon ties flood the airwaves, telling us what we’re supposed to think.

It’s always the same loop—reaction, analysis, distraction—and it’s always behind the curve. Not the arc of history but the dog’s curve: legacy media panting after each event like a dog chasing a rabbit—eyes on the latest spectacle, oblivious to the machinery behind it.

It’s not that the corporate press is lazy. It’s complicit. It keeps us fixated on the effects of U.S. imperial power while playing the innocent about its trajectory. The result is a truncated consciousness. We’re allowed to debate whether a bombing was “proportional” or “legal,” but never to ask how the path to war was paved long before the first bomber left the airfield.

Here’s the truth: these wars are not accidents. They are not even responses. They are the execution of policies that were written years ago in think tanks funded by weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel giants, and billionaire-backed foundations, as primed for action as a Manchurian candidate waiting for the trigger word.

Take the Brookings Institution’s 2009 policy blueprint Which Path to Persia?—a document that might as well have been titled How to Justify War with Iran While Pretending We Tried Everything Else. Written in the cold language of strategic planning, the paper lays out multiple “paths”: sanctions, covert action, regime destabilization, and, of course, outright military intervention. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re options on a shelf, ready to be taken down when the timing is right—or when the public is suitably softened up by headlines and horror stories.

This is how empire works in the 21st century. First, the government and its corporate backers fund “nonpartisan” think tanks to generate policy proposals. These papers are drafted by former government officials, ex-military strategists, and Ivy League technocrats. Next, lawyers scrub the documents and shape their language into legislative text. Lobbyists—often from the same think tanks—deliver the packages to lawmakers who depend on their donors. Finally, when the time comes, the president announces that we must “act decisively.”

And the media? They chase the dog’s curve—never ask where the rabbit is heading. They bring on a retired general, maybe a “senior fellow” from Brookings or CSIS, and they talk about the tactical details. They might even question the decision—Was this the right time? Did we warn allies?—but the underlying logic of permanent U.S. military dominance? That never makes it to the segment.

The irony is that the real planning isn’t even secret. It’s all out in the open. The policy papers are online. The revolving door between think tanks, Congress, the Pentagon, and the defense industry is well-documented. But acknowledging this would mean confronting the fact that America is not a democracy in any meaningful sense when it comes to foreign policy. It’s an empire run on autopilot, with bipartisan support and a corporate media machine trained to explain it all away.

And it works because the spectacle is so good. Bombs are cinematic. Drones are sleek. Maps of missile trajectories look like video game graphics. Meanwhile, the institutions that manufacture consent—the think tanks, the editorial boards, the so-called “serious” policy experts—remain untouched, unquestioned, and endlessly recycled.

You want to stop the next war? Stop chasing the aftermath. Start interrogating the institutions that plan these wars in advance. Dig into the budgets, the white papers, the interlocking boards of directors that tie together Raytheon, CNN, and the State Department. Name the names. Burn the polite fiction that any of this is about freedom, democracy, or defense.

Because until we stop confusing motion with meaning—until we stop reacting to each war as if it’s a surprise—we’ll be dragged along behind that spectacle-studded dog’s curve, watching each “new” surprise, as if it leapt out of nowhere.

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