Posted on 02/04/2004 5:33:51 AM PST by dixiepatriot
I Still Owe the Military Nothing
by Brad Edmonds
My article on the military drew more emails than I've seen since I wrote a couple of years ago that Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry was a commie rat. Then Paul Craig Roberts wrote this week a few good reasons why it's sometimes no fun to be a columnist. Just because it's enlightening and amusing (and a little informative), I thought it would be interesting to discuss the responses to my military article.
Free Republic was the most fun. As Paul Craig Roberts pointed out, some people will invent things they believe were in your article, and focus on those. One reader acted offended that I considered the rank of major "lowly," which I didn't suggest (I was putting it in relation to 2- and 3-star generals); another assumed my dad retired as a major, which I didn't suggest, and which wasn't the case. Others understood that I retired from the CIA, which I didn't. I was there for a relatively short time, and left in 1990. There was little of substance mostly empty invective on Free Republic, though one reader successfully corrected my simplification of US foreign policy in the Middle East to "40 years of bombing." I should have linked this article by Adam Young, and referred to "50 years of ham-handed, violent, dictatorial, capricious intervention" instead of "40 years of bombing." I stand corrected. Freepers, as they're called, are self-selected, and virtually all neocons; almost no libertarians are among them. I counted, just for fun, about 70 different posters, 65 of whom were opposed to my viewpoint (about 60 of those without substance).
My emails, also subject to self-selection, were just the opposite. I counted, just for fun, and heard from 114 different people so far. 105 were in agreement, nine disagreed. Of those who identified themselves as military veterans, 32 agreed while only three wrote to disagree. None of the three claimed to have been a combat veteran, while many of the 32 mentioned the wars in which they saw combat.
Without exception, those who disagreed simply restated the point I wrote to dispel: That we owe our freedom to the military. A few thought they had me on a legal point: Since I noted that Americans' freedoms have decreased, some readers thought I'd confused the purpose of the military (defense from foreign invasion) with civil government (the enactment of laws, the existence of which limits freedom). No, they didn't have me; they made my point that the military has little to do with freedom.
The only thing the military can do for our freedom is to repel an attack from an invader who, in occupying, would offer us a less free society than we have now. I mean, we must consider the possibility that an occupying force can increase our freedom, right? Isn't this Bush's point in Iraq? So, for our military to have been effective in protecting our freedom, the enemy must be (1) credible; (2) willing and prepared to attack; (3) likely to reduce our freedom if he wins; and (4) repelled by either the action, or the threat, of our military.
This circumstance has never obtained in our history, and probably never will. The British, in 1812, were the single most credible invading threat we've ever faced, and if the British invaded successfully they still might not have had a tremendous impact on our liberty either way. (Remember the Whiskey Rebellion? Our liberty was threatened by our own government in 1791.) Further, the most effective defense we had in 1812 was privateers private ships, paid only in captured booty (which gave them incentive to preserve the enemy and his ships). So much for the government's military there.
The next "invasion" was the Union army invading the sovereign CSA, which only established once and for all that there was nothing voluntary about the US government. We have never been in any credible danger of being forced to speak Spanish, Japanese, German, or frankly, Russian. (We were in some danger of being hit by Soviet nuclear weapons, but the only deterrent was our own bombs not men and women, not command structures, since ICBMs could be launched on Moscow from inside the US.)
The USSR was credible, likely to reduce our freedom, and somewhat hampered, if not repelled, by our military (but really mostly by our under-the-table payments to, for example, Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; and our placements of missiles in Europe), but the USSR was never prepared to attack us. Hitler and Germany never constituted a credible threat to the US, and Hitler himself made no secret that he thought the new world order should consist of Germany, England, and the United States. Japan was goaded into Pearl Harbor, starving and desperate to break up our blockade of oil, steel, etc. against their island; but Japan never had any wish to invade the US. (Freepers take note: Yes, Germany, Japan, and the USSR were evil. Yes they were. I agree. They were still never a threat to us, with our without our military.)
What has made the US an uninviting target for 200 years is the oceans and our gun ownership. As Iraq and Afghanistan have proven in the last three years, making war halfway around the world is expensive, risky, and difficult even for the US, even today, even when attacking pathetically weaker opponents. Universal gun ownership means an occupying force can never succeed. To occupy, you have to step out of your planes and humvees and move on foot. The more the natives own guns and want to resist, the more ground area you have to occupy continuously. With a nation full of rifle-toting rednecks, a hostile foreign power can never succeed. To obliterate us, they would be forced to nuke us.
There is no incentive for any nation to do that to any other: There would be nothing of value to steal afterward, and it would be costly and dangerous for the nation using the nukes. America did it to Japan because we knew Japan was already defeated, and we were the only ones in the world who had nukes. Indeed, to prove the disincentives work: Truman bombed Japan because the Japanese demanded as their only condition of surrender that the emperor remain emperor. They continued to demand this after both bombings, so Truman just gave in. The bombings were for nothing. And with no retaliation for Truman or the US to fear, Truman still stopped, and gave the Japanese what they wanted. They didn't even have rifles.
We have rifles.
Heck, I'd be more prone to believe we owed our freedom to the military if they were here, defending our borders (or even their own headquarters). They're not.
And as to my point that the military is just a tool for Congress and the president, you don't have to listen to me. Listen to a retired Marine general, twice winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, on the subject.
We don't need a standing federal military. If someone invades, militias can pop up, with rifles and perhaps a government commission (while we still have forcible government) to get the job done and then disband until the next invasion. I'll be there, ready to go. Let me know when it happens.
February 4, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/edmonds/edmonds181.html
Two years ago, long after my academic days were over a book was published that claimed Martin Bormann, an inner circle Nazi, was a Soviet operative and that he purposefully insured no help from the Ukraine. That opens a lot of doors for serious history students trying to understand just what happened in Russia.
When you look at the simple statistics of industrial output of Germany, there was really no chance that Germany would be much of a threat, ever, and her riches were mostly plunder and American Wall St credit from the likes of among other, Prescott Bush.
While debating the minutiae of Operation Barbarossa and what went wrong, from the German perspective, the military historians seem to have faded to the background but the central thesis remains, that Hitler gave into OKW and allowed the forces to be split which more or less was U-89's point, that the force that might have finished Stalin was much to weak and divided by the end of '41 that the battle was effectively loss with a front longer than the East Coast.
You are correct that the invasion was delayed and that the weather hindered them greatly but that only magnified the trouble that they started off undermanned for the job in the first place. However I am of the opinion that had the invasion not been held up (because of the British and the Itlaians) and had the Germans had the forces and muntions lost in the Balkans, Greece, Crete and north Afrika (plus occupation of said areas) availble to them for Russia it is very possible they could have taken out the Soviets or at least met their objectives and built a strong in depth defensive postion by the Urals.
Most of the folk over there fall into the same intellectual trap; they confuse acting rationally with assuming that others will act rationally.
The truth is that many people act irrationally, and you have to take that into account when making your own rational decisions. Too often, the ieologues at Rockwell don't do that. They come up with a nice plan, assume that it will work because other people will react to it based on pure reason and self-interest, and then assert that they've solved a problem. But when people are willing to blow themselves up to reach Paradise and 77 virgins, assuming rational responses to rational stimuli is a pipe dream.
Please explain how you conclude that from anything I said.
>Remember, Hitler declared war on US.
Please see post #53. And in addition to what's there I'll add that while we were "neutral" we were involved in lend lease to one side of a conflict and had our navy aiding and abetting the Brits in the Atlantic.
Yet.
Germany posed no threat to the US
Yet.
If the US had not entered the war against Germany, and the Germans had defeated and annexed the USSR, all of Europe and the Middle-East and defeated and/or conquered the UK, the US would have found itself very alone in the world, facing an incredibly powerful and aggresive German Reich.
A war with Germany would have been inevitable. However, if we'd waited to fight them until the 50's or 60's, we would have been at a major disadvantage.
Plus, putting an end to the evils of Nazism was worth fighting a war, no matter what the loss of American life.
Is that because they couldnt manage to subdue England on their own or because we were already supplying England with lots of Materiel?
I call this the "If everyone would just...." syndrome.
You see it often among "Earnest Young Leftist Protestors," and "Earnests and Idealistic Engineers and Other Technical Sorts." (In my experience, libertarians tend very often to be of the latter sort.)
The basic idea is as you've stated -- they've got this "obvious" solution, and assume that it's as obvious to everybody else, as it is to them.
Neither group seems to understand that people very often do not "just...." In fact, they often do the exact opposite.
"Sweet ..."
First:
>I might agree with the author that a policy of isolationism may have been preferable if we'd followed it consistently since the 1800's. But we haven't. Adopting such a policy now, when then clearly are large numbers of extremists who really don't like us, and when Europe looks like it is slowly circling the drain, is dangerous.
The old saying is tired but true " If you want out of a hole, first thing stop digging." I'm glad that you do see some error in our foreign policy over the last hundred years. Most I encounter here on FR refuse to admit that much. Since you do I'll engage. Starting with the term "isolation" that is a wide spread but malicious misnomer which has to be corrected. The founding fathers' and today's libertarians believe in "free trade with all and entangling alliances with none" and " not going abroad seeking monsters to destroy." That is not isolation. It is called peaceful interaction. Isolation is what the hermit nation of Japan was in before we sent some gun boats into Tokyo bay to force them open to our merchants.
>Most of the folk over there fall into the same intellectual trap; they confuse acting rationally with assuming that others will act rationally.
>The truth is that many people act irrationally, and you have to take that into account when making your own rational decisions. Too often, the ideologues at Rockwell don't do that. They come up with a nice plan, assume that it will work because other people will react to it based on pure reason and self-interest, and then assert that they've solved a problem. But when people are willing to blow themselves up to reach Paradise and 77 virgins, assuming rational responses to rational stimuli is a pipe dream.
Self interest is a basic instinct. It factors in everything we and others do. As for reason, yes we are capable of it. Even if others are unreasonable we can, using our reason, logically analyze a situation and plan our activities knowing how to handle others based on their M.O. As for foreigners willing to blowing themselves up that is how they believe, fact of the matter. It's only meaningful to us because they are attacking us. We can not properly proceed to deal with that reality without understanding why they attack us. Well the terrorists themselves said why - because we are stationed on their holy land, we war against their brother Arabs and they do not see us as honest brokers in the affairs of the mid east. The obvious conclusion to our troubles would be to remove our forces from their lands and stop meddling in their affairs. We can do business with them quite nicely without having our troops on the ground, toppling their governments, supporting oppressive regimes and interfering with their lives and culture in any way. But no, we will not do any of that as we have long standing plans of getting more involved in the region. Therefore we decide that the whole area needs to be subdued and the entire culture remade to our standards and values. Let me ask you, does the latter course of action really sound achievable and given the mind set of a billion people over there do you think the likely result from our actions will be anything other than more terror? (they use terror becasue they are not strong enough to directly war agaisnt us).
In summation if we are an economic powerhouse it is in other's self interest to have peaceful relations with us. Our size, geographic location and strength makes us so formidable no one would invade our nation as it is not feasible. While we will never live in a trouble free world our troubles would be reduced to practically nil if we did not have far flung military bases and feel the need to project force and meddle in other countries' affairs (which we frequently do to gain business advantage, see General Smedley Butler's War is Racket).
P.S. Not to mention that being a global meddler and policman is a direct threat to our own liberty. The blow back of our policies - terrorism, results in a greater police and survailance state at home which will only grow stronger with each new attack plus we must suffer the burden of higher and higher taxation, debt and inflation to pay for wars, far flund bases, arms races, action building, occupation and buying allies.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.