Butting In
After watching all the time, space and windage expended on Cindy Sheehan's flappin'-in-the-breeze crusade down in Crawford, I'm once again reminded of how coherent ideology is ultimately better policy than reactive, short-sighted pandering to the crisis of the moment. I find myself watching all of this and trying to pull the intertwined issues apart. As far as I can tell, it involves attitudes toward the military, attitudes toward the use of US military power, and most importantly whether or not political globalism is such a hot idea.
I find myself in a strange position regarding the military. Having grown up in a family of WWI and WWII survivors, I was raised in an environment where putting on uniforms and taking up arms was about the most noble thing a person could do. Much to the chagrin of my family, however, I was literate at an early age, and hence developed an interest in national/world affairs. Since Vietnam was not only going on back in those days, but was on the evening news every night, it didn't long before I had trouble seeing war with the same rose-colored glasses as my family. As I got older, the thing that especially bothered me about the military was the draft. With the possible exception of jury duty, I can think of no greater violation of individual liberty than the draft. That really turned me into a career civilian -- and when the draft was abolished and we switched over to an all volunteer military I became smugly convinced that only a microcephalic fool would ever volunteer to join up, put on a soldier suit, and possibly get wasted in the name of flag and country.
To be honest, I still don't quite get what drives one to join the military, but on the other hand as I've gotten older I have to respect the fact that these people are indeed volunteers. Moreover, as I've learned after about two decades at various universities, not everyone is university material, so I suppose if you're willing to put up with the BS, the military can be a way up the ladder. Most importantly, since these people are legal adults and actually choose to be soldiers/sailors/marines -- they're not "children" ... no matter what their grieving parents may claim.
Of course, how the government chooses to use these volunteers is another issue. Curiously, every government -- be it demopublican or republicratic -- always seems to come up with a justification to send these volunteers into harm's way. After the initial rallying around the flag, tweedledumb inevitably finds fault with the way tweedledumber is running the show, and the same old arguments break out. The hawks fight the appeasers, the pacifists go on hunger strikes, the hard left demands the immediate withdrawal of our forces, and the hard right starts talking about chucking atomic bombs around and taking out anyone perceived to be "unfriendly to US interests". If we're really lucky, Jimmy Carter makes a clandestine visit to his favorite dictator of the moment, and ABCNBCCBSCNN gushes enthusiastically about his legacy as a "peacemaker". FOX then brings on a retired 5-star general to explain why we should clandestinely wire Carter with explosives and detonate him during the state dinner.
I would argue, however, that this same old scenario misses a very important point: is political globalism in our best interest? For the past hundred years or so the US has abandoned its former non-interventionist approach to foreign policy in favor of meddling anywhere and everywhere in the name of "promoting freedom", "making peace", "making the world safe for democracy", or as President Shrub recently termed it: "bringing freedom to the world". But all of this nationalistic hyperbole aside, what has it really gotten us? We tipped the balance of power in WWI, which went a long way toward insuring that we'd have to do it all over again in WWII. That in turn wound up getting us involved in the Cold War, which got us involved in Korea and Vietnam. I shudder to think how much we spent on all of these endeavors in both money and manpower, and with each "success" we only wound up committed to spending more to continue what we started. Greneda, Panama, Gulf War One and Gulf War Two have only tipped the balance further in the direction of high cost / low return.
And what has it gotten us? Are we safer and more secure? Are our liberties safer from government intrusion? Are we perchance ready to acknowledge that political correctness is rotting our brains, or that spending our way to prosperity is wrecking our economy, or that leaving our border with Mexico open is destabilizing any number of states? Has anyone even bothered to think about how many stolen taxpayer dollars it takes to prop up Israel (which is not the 51st state, contrary to popular rumor), blow up a few Islamikazis in Iraq/Afghanistan, or hand out condoms in some remote corner of Africa? People will get worked up over paying an extra dollar to pull money out of an ATM, yet the money we spend to be hated around the world never seems to be a burning issue.
It should be. Protesting the war in Iraq is focusing on a mere symptom of a much larger disease. The disease is the US government's interventionist mentality. To trade with all nations and allow our citizens to freely deal with all nations is fine -- but the US government should return to an official policy of strict non-intervention. As long as we accept the premise that it's the right/duty of the US government to butt in around the world, some group of us can always rationalize the reasons behind the intervention. Curiously, back in the days when the preservation of our liberty and national sovereignty were hot issues, this was abundantly clear. For instance, none other than George Washington noted in his Farewell Address that: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible."
To put it even more basically, it is difficult (if not downright impossible) to effectively intervene in your best friend's marriage - no matter how well you know both parties and how close you really are. If it doesn't work at home, what in the name of your favorite deity makes you think you can intervene in a foreign country with a foreign culture 10,000 miles around the world? It just doesn't make sense to me, and I would argue that there's abundant evidence that it doesn't work very well either.
Hell, while Cindy Sheehan was out making the world safe from George Bush, her husband filed for divorce citing "irreconcilable differences". Yet another example of how the specific, localized aspects of life are difficult enough to deal with. The more generalized, broader issues are the real bear.
I find myself in a strange position regarding the military. Having grown up in a family of WWI and WWII survivors, I was raised in an environment where putting on uniforms and taking up arms was about the most noble thing a person could do. Much to the chagrin of my family, however, I was literate at an early age, and hence developed an interest in national/world affairs. Since Vietnam was not only going on back in those days, but was on the evening news every night, it didn't long before I had trouble seeing war with the same rose-colored glasses as my family. As I got older, the thing that especially bothered me about the military was the draft. With the possible exception of jury duty, I can think of no greater violation of individual liberty than the draft. That really turned me into a career civilian -- and when the draft was abolished and we switched over to an all volunteer military I became smugly convinced that only a microcephalic fool would ever volunteer to join up, put on a soldier suit, and possibly get wasted in the name of flag and country.
To be honest, I still don't quite get what drives one to join the military, but on the other hand as I've gotten older I have to respect the fact that these people are indeed volunteers. Moreover, as I've learned after about two decades at various universities, not everyone is university material, so I suppose if you're willing to put up with the BS, the military can be a way up the ladder. Most importantly, since these people are legal adults and actually choose to be soldiers/sailors/marines -- they're not "children" ... no matter what their grieving parents may claim.
Of course, how the government chooses to use these volunteers is another issue. Curiously, every government -- be it demopublican or republicratic -- always seems to come up with a justification to send these volunteers into harm's way. After the initial rallying around the flag, tweedledumb inevitably finds fault with the way tweedledumber is running the show, and the same old arguments break out. The hawks fight the appeasers, the pacifists go on hunger strikes, the hard left demands the immediate withdrawal of our forces, and the hard right starts talking about chucking atomic bombs around and taking out anyone perceived to be "unfriendly to US interests". If we're really lucky, Jimmy Carter makes a clandestine visit to his favorite dictator of the moment, and ABCNBCCBSCNN gushes enthusiastically about his legacy as a "peacemaker". FOX then brings on a retired 5-star general to explain why we should clandestinely wire Carter with explosives and detonate him during the state dinner.
I would argue, however, that this same old scenario misses a very important point: is political globalism in our best interest? For the past hundred years or so the US has abandoned its former non-interventionist approach to foreign policy in favor of meddling anywhere and everywhere in the name of "promoting freedom", "making peace", "making the world safe for democracy", or as President Shrub recently termed it: "bringing freedom to the world". But all of this nationalistic hyperbole aside, what has it really gotten us? We tipped the balance of power in WWI, which went a long way toward insuring that we'd have to do it all over again in WWII. That in turn wound up getting us involved in the Cold War, which got us involved in Korea and Vietnam. I shudder to think how much we spent on all of these endeavors in both money and manpower, and with each "success" we only wound up committed to spending more to continue what we started. Greneda, Panama, Gulf War One and Gulf War Two have only tipped the balance further in the direction of high cost / low return.
And what has it gotten us? Are we safer and more secure? Are our liberties safer from government intrusion? Are we perchance ready to acknowledge that political correctness is rotting our brains, or that spending our way to prosperity is wrecking our economy, or that leaving our border with Mexico open is destabilizing any number of states? Has anyone even bothered to think about how many stolen taxpayer dollars it takes to prop up Israel (which is not the 51st state, contrary to popular rumor), blow up a few Islamikazis in Iraq/Afghanistan, or hand out condoms in some remote corner of Africa? People will get worked up over paying an extra dollar to pull money out of an ATM, yet the money we spend to be hated around the world never seems to be a burning issue.
It should be. Protesting the war in Iraq is focusing on a mere symptom of a much larger disease. The disease is the US government's interventionist mentality. To trade with all nations and allow our citizens to freely deal with all nations is fine -- but the US government should return to an official policy of strict non-intervention. As long as we accept the premise that it's the right/duty of the US government to butt in around the world, some group of us can always rationalize the reasons behind the intervention. Curiously, back in the days when the preservation of our liberty and national sovereignty were hot issues, this was abundantly clear. For instance, none other than George Washington noted in his Farewell Address that: "The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible."
To put it even more basically, it is difficult (if not downright impossible) to effectively intervene in your best friend's marriage - no matter how well you know both parties and how close you really are. If it doesn't work at home, what in the name of your favorite deity makes you think you can intervene in a foreign country with a foreign culture 10,000 miles around the world? It just doesn't make sense to me, and I would argue that there's abundant evidence that it doesn't work very well either.
Hell, while Cindy Sheehan was out making the world safe from George Bush, her husband filed for divorce citing "irreconcilable differences". Yet another example of how the specific, localized aspects of life are difficult enough to deal with. The more generalized, broader issues are the real bear.
posted by DrJDG @ 01:27
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