Posted on 03/18/2014 4:40:40 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Are Americans today war-weary? Sure. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been frustrating and tiring. Are Americans today unusually war-weary? No. They were wearier after the much larger and even more frustrating conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. And even though the two world wars of the last century had more satisfactory outcomes, their magnitude was such that they couldn’t help but induce a significant sense of war-weariness. And history shows that they did.
So American war-weariness isn’t new. Using it as an excuse to avoid maintaining our defenses or shouldering our responsibilities isn’t new, either. But that doesn’t make it admirable.
The March 5 Wall Street Journal featured a letter from Heidi Szrom of Valparaiso, Indiana. She was responding to an earlier letter defending President Obama’s foreign policies against a powerful critique in the Journal by the historian Niall Ferguson (“America’s Global Retreat”). The first letter writer noted Ferguson’s statement that more people may have died violent deaths in the Greater Middle East in the Obama years than under Bush, but excused Obama:
True, but it is also equally certain that fewer Americans have died violent deaths in the Greater Middle East during this presidency than during the previous one, and this is what matters more now to a war-weary American public.
To which Ms. Szrom responded:
According to pundits, the president and letter writers, America is “war weary.” Every time I hear this, I wonder: Did you serve? Did you volunteer to fight oppression in foreign lands? Did your son or brother or husband? If so, then I understand and sympathize with your complaint . . . unlike most of those who utter this shopworn phrase.
Perhaps the country’s weariness stems from a reluctance to face unpleasant truths—one of which is that power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. . . . History tells us it will only be a temporary reprieve. Our current defense cuts ensure that we will be woefully unprepared to face the next test. We are so weary that we are falling asleep.
Well said. If only Republican elected officials were half as clear-minded and nearly as courageous as Ms. Szrom in taking on the claim that we all need to defer to, to bow down to, our own war-weariness. In fact, the idol of war-weariness can be challenged. A war-weary public can be awakened and rallied. Indeed, events are right now doing the awakening. All that’s needed is the rallying. And the turnaround can be fast. Only 5 years after the end of the Vietnam war, and 15 years after our involvement there began in a big way, Ronald Reagan ran against both Democratic dovishness and Republican détente. He proposed confronting the Soviet Union and rebuilding our military. It was said that the country was too war-weary, that it was too soon after Vietnam, for Reagan’s stern and challenging message. Yet Reagan won the election in 1980. And by 1990 an awakened America had won the Cold War.
The next president will be elected in 2016, 15 years after 9/11 and 5 years after our abandonment of Iraq and the beginning of the drawdown in Afghanistan. Pundits will say that it would be politically foolish to try to awaken Americans rather than cater to their alleged war-weariness. We can’t prove them wrong. Perhaps it would be easier for a Republican to win in 2016 running after the fashion of Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1920 rather than that of Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1980.
But what would such a victory be worth? The term “war-weary” (actually “war-wearied”) may have first appeared in Shakespeare. In Henry VI, Part 1 (Act IV, Scene 4), the Earl of Somerset, for reasons of domestic political calculation, resists the entreaty of Sir William Lucy to go to the aid of his fellow English lord, “the over-daring Talbot,”
Who, ring’d about with bold adversity,
Cries out for noble York and Somerset,
To beat assailing death from his weak legions:
And whiles the honourable captain there
Drops bloody sweat from his war-wearied limbs,
And, in advantage lingering, looks for rescue,
You, his false hopes, the trust of England’s honour,
Keep off aloof with worthless emulation.
Somerset fails to rescue Talbot, but grandly states,
If he be dead, brave Talbot, then adieu!
To which Lucy replies,
His fame lives in the world, his shame in you.
Can Republicans do no better than shamefully to emulate Somerset and Obama (“I assure you nobody ends up being more war-weary than me”)? Will no brave leader step forward to honorably awaken us from our unworthy sleep?
Hardly. The total cost for our post-9/11 wars, including indirect costs like medical care for veterans, is 3 to 4 trillion dollars. The total Medicare/Medicaid budget annually is a bit less than 800 billion, with fraud being maybe ten percent of that.
I think such an analogy, while conceptually valid, is too small to adequately reflect the American-Israeli dynamic. No one was going to advocate for honor killing based on which part of the Anglospere they favored.
You are not talking about just an ethnic group, here. An overt turn against Israel would be a repudiation of our very civilization, and a de facto invitation to the proselytizing barbarity that is Islam.
So far, we have managed to preserve a tense but workable balance. I do not believe it would be in the interest of our American Way Of Life to convincingly present ourselves as a "friend" to Islam for fear of the liberties such a friendship would invite.
Actually, they've moved on.
They would accuse Lincoln and Seward of being "part of the same hypocrisy."
They would probably characterize Forrest as being a victim of his own environment, and an inevitable product of America's capitalist system.
You see, for postmodern leftists - as well as for racial determinists - there are no absolute standards of right and wrong.
There is no iron law.
A war that opens up formerly closed markets is often good for an economy.
While I don't necessarily agree with the notion that warfare is always an economic stimulus, it is undeniable that quite a few of the dollars spent on warfare are circulated back into the US economy - it's not a pure loss of GDP and so assessing the financial cost of war solely as government payments is reductive.
This whole "our wars kept us safe from terrorism at home" line reminds me a bit of the rooster who thought that his crowing in the morning made the sun rise.
This is terrible reasoning.
Terrorism is an intentional human phenomenon, the rotation of the earth on its axis isn't.
Drawing out terrorists to fight you on your terms on foreign soil has strategic insight.
How many would-be terrorists decided to take the easier route of slipping into Iraq or Afghanistan to fight Americans than go through the more expensive, more time-consuming, and riskier exercise of trying to pull off an attack in the US?
It is a fact that our forces liquidated quite a few foreign adventurers in both countries.
Leftists often say "there is no absolute right or wrong" when it comes to matters related to sexual morality. However, these self-styled moral relativists suddenly become moral absolutists when it comes to condemning "racism". As do many watered down Republicans who have adopted their own form of political correctness and try to outdo the Left in accusing their political opponents of "racism."
By the same token, you could argue that the government giving money to any individual or entity could stimulate the economy because those dollars will eventually circulate into the broader market. Keynes claimed that during an economic downturn, it's worthwhile to pay somebody to dig a ditch and fill it back in because he'll spend his paycheck and stimulate the economy. The trouble is, no additional wealth is created in the process because you're using the same amount of money taken from person X to pay person Y to dig the ditch and fill it back in. Arguments against Keynesian stimulus in the civil sector apply just as well to military Keynesianism.
Terrorism is an intentional human phenomenon, the rotation of the earth on its axis isn't.
If the war was about fighting Islamic terrorism, why was the largest amount of resources committed to overthrowing a secular dictator in a country which (until after the war) had no Al-Quaeda presence? Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the nation most responsible for sponsoring and exporting Islamic extremism abroad, was coddled. As relevant as Iraq was to fighting Islamism and Al Quaeda, the whole enterprise may as well have been about the Earth's rotation.
But paying someone to develop or refine new weapons systems is not the same thing as paying someone to dig a hole and fill it back in.
That kind of work often generates additive innovations.
If the war was about fighting Islamic terrorism
The war in Afghanistan was about terrorism.
The war in Iraq was about overthrowing a dictator who had committed various acts of war against the US that had not been responded to - and, realistically, it was about asserting US power in the center of Asia.
And, of course, it is just silly to refer to Hussein as a secularist.
One of his pet projects was building the world's largest mosque and one of his prize possessions was a Koran he had calligraphers write in his own blood.
On the issue of terrorism, Huessein had been sheltering Abu Nidal for a decade.
He was killed not long before the US invaded Iraq.
The reliably anti-American Robert Fisk alleges that he was killed because he was an American spy trying to falsely connect Hussein with Al-Qaeda.
More likely he was killed because he was the one link Hussein had with Al-Qaeda.
When "Islamic Study Centers" are created in western cities to proselytize their radical and violent interpretation of Islam to Muslim immigrants, they are inevitably funded from Saudi Arabia, not from Iraq. It's no accident that most if the 9/11 hijackers and the leadership of Al Quaeda is Saudi, not Iraqi, and that Saudi Arabia has the strictest Sharia law and the least tolerance of non-Islamic faiths in the Arab world. Yet our elected officials hold the hands (literally) of the Saudi sponsors of radical Islam while waging a war in Iraq as a diversion, designed to convince people that "something" was being done to fight terrorism.
You argue that the Iraqi government was not Islamist because Al-Qaeda supposedly did not approve of it.
You also argue that the Saudi government is Islamist, despite the fact that Al-Qaeda does not approve of it.
In fact, Al-Qaeda has tried to overthrow the Saudi government, while Al-Qaeda never tried to overthrow Hussein, but did ally themselves with his fedayeen after he was overthrown.
Clearly the Saudi government promotes their ideological agenda in the United States using their wealth.
Iraq would have done the same, I'm sure, had they the wealth and positive diplomatic relationship with the US that the Saudis have.
Iran would also do the same if it could.
Of course, by the criterion of Al-Qaeda disapproval, Iran's government would not be Islamist because of their heretical Shi'ism.
Do you think it was an accident that there were large Christian communities in Iraq until Hussein’s government was overthrown? The point isn’t that Nasser, Hussein, Assad, etc. are/were good people (you don’t find many of those in the Middle East), the point is that as a Christian or a secular Muslim, you’re better off under their rule than you are under Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam.
They weren't that large, and they were much larger before he came to power.
They also served a diplomatic purpose.
the point is that as a Christian or a secular Muslim, you’re better off under their rule than you are under Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam
I don't see much difference. Under either regime you are a "hewer of wood and a drawer of water" - and far more Christians live and work in Saudi Arabia than ever did in Hussein's Iraq.
They are quasi-permanent residents, not citizens.
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