Our framers were learned men well acquainted with the classics who fully understood what happened when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. So they gave us civilian control of the military and to further ensure that concept we enacted legislation known as posse comitatus.
But you ask the deeper question, why are our foreign entanglements so cavalierly undertaken and so difficult to extricate from? Clearly, it is just as difficult to get out as it is to frame an order of battle while we are in, and order designed to accomplish the very purpose of the incursion in the first place. Why is mission creep such a prevalent virus even as our rules of engagement become more anemic? Why do our leaders lie to our people and even to themselves about whether we are succeeding or failing in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq?
My belief is that we have to analyze these failings from the bottom up rather than complain of the symptoms. Is it to be forgotten that academia reacted to the gravest foreign attack on the American homeland since the war of 1812 by blaming America for 9/11? We contracted amnesia over Korea, shattered the country over Vietnam, and undermined every war since World War II. We are in fact a divided nation not just about what the proper course of action for our country might be but whether in fact we have a proper country. The postmodern American left does not believe in American exceptionalism. In fact it is worse than that, the left does not believe that America deserves to prosper as a functioning democracy much less prevail in foreign conflicts. In the face of this division, it is hopeless to expect our politicians to rise above demagoguery and it is unfair to ask our generals to solve a problem in the face of the enemy which rots at the core of the country.
So we deal with symptoms.
I must be careful about casting the first stone on this issue, I was flat wrong about the war in Iraq and had to recant in a mea culpa vanity for my support of that ill-conceived war. Nevertheless, it seems to me that we are in a race against time and the immutable laws of economics which dictate that if we do not get our fiscal house in order it will not matter where we locate troops, or what sort of sophisticated weapons we develop, the disintegration at home will wipe everything away. We cannot get our fiscal house in order until we get our moral house in order for our budgets, like our rules of engagement, are merely another expression of the same moral malaise.
The problem which terrorists understand and seek to exploit is a moral one. Benjamin Franklin got it right in 1776 when he said, "if we do not hang together we most assuredly will hang separately." This country is not hanging together.
