Column By John Young
Clearly, he didn’t want you to know.
Maybe he thought the war he started would all be over by morning’s light.
A few bombs, a few missiles. You needn’t bother.
So on his social media arm, he announced it at just past 2 a.m. Were you up at that time? Me, neither. Did networks break into programming?
Well, never you mind. His comments weren’t meant for you. Most of what he said was addressed to Iranians. He didn’t address Americans at all.
“Now you have a president who is giving you what you want,” he said. The “you” was them, not you.
What do the Iranians want? “Regime change,” said our Supreme Leader.
Regime change, “nation-building.” These are things he’d said — over and over and over – he’d never support as president.
That was before he realized how war fits so neatly into the gig economy. War is his gig now.
With the WarDash app, it’s all business. Rapid response guaranteed.
Bibi Netanyahu has the app — with an unlimited account via U.S. taxpayers. When the urge to bomb Iran again hit the other night after finding little to entertain himself on a Netflix bender, he turned to WarDash on his phone:
“Let’s pick up where we left off in June, Bro,” Netanyahu texted the man with the arms and armies. With a click on the app, young American men and women, and ships and fighter jets, were on their way to fight Bibi’s war.
Barely two months ago, the oil interests that underwrote this presidency took to their WarDash app and, in an instant, our fighting forces captured Venezuela’s president. The pretense was “narcoterrorism.”
You may wonder who benefits from this enterprise. Be assured: not you.
In the 1970s, Black Sabbath had a hit with the protest anthem, “War Pigs.” In 2026, while the nation sleeps, the White House queues up “War Gigs.”
At this time, many who voted for this man are asking why they did. Most likely, it had something to do with the economy, which would have meant continuing the job growth and slow progress on inflation achieved by his predecessor.
That’s not happening, particularly since we’ve now made it our mission to bomb others into this president’s idea of governance. Cuba is next, he says.
At the risk of stating what needs not to be said, this quote comes to mind:
“War is public policy.”
But war is not public under this president. It’s proprietary: his property, his enterprise. It’s like the abominations of ICE. The person who protests — even on his or her own neighborhood street – trespasses on ICE property.
Leader Supreme had a chance to explain it all in his February rant before Congress. But war is no longer our or Congress’s “bidness,” to borrow a term Molly Ivins immortalized.
Now we are in a war with scant public support and a commander-in-chief who couldn’t care less about it. The things his voters expected upon his election can rot.
All those viciously capricious DOGE savings are going up in concrete shards in a foreign land as we bomb, baby, bomb. One report estimates that in the war’s first five days, we burned through $2.8 billion in Patriot missile interceptors. That’s $4 million a pop. But, hey, war is an economic stimulant. It will pay for itself. Yes?
The war-as-gig attitude is not new. Back in 1991, George H.W. Bush sent U.S. troops to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.
Though few allies wanted to expose their own soldiers in any battle, several agreed to help pay. It was a contract job.
The result was an economic oddity: For the first time in many moons with an export-import ledger in the red, the United States could claim a trade surplus.
This lent itself to the question: Is war the only thing we can make?
Almost from the moment troops came home from Operation Desert Storm — parades and speeches and all – swelling support for President Bush began to plummet.
In his bid for re-election, he was defeated by a young governor from Arkansas who maintained focus on real-world, at-home voter desires thanks to an adviser’s admonition:
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
