Seeing the forest — run amuck American Special Operations deployments

© 2017 Peter Free

 

26 June 2017

 

 

US foreign and military policy is so economically and strategically absurd that . . .

 

. . . the Founders would use 2017 America as an example of the imperially rampant militarism that they had wished to avoid.

 

 

Consider this one fact

 

Plucked from the "can't see the forest for the trees" syndrome:

 

 

Last year, America’s most elite forces conducted missions in 138 countries – roughly 70% of the nations on the planet, according to figures supplied to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command.

 

Halfway through 2017, U.S. commandos have already been deployed to an astonishing 137 countries, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw.

 

© 2017 Nick Turse, A Wide World of Winless War: Globe-Trotting U.S. Special Ops Forces Already Deployed to 137 Nations in 2017, TomDispatch (25 June 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

Can you think of any strategically legitimate reason for this?

 

Do our vital national interests really require commandos in 70 percent of the planet's sovereign nations?

 

Doing unspoken things behind everybody's backs?

 

With no culturally realistic chance of furthering sound American policy by (in effect) harassing some of the people who live there?

 

 

The nation's Founders would lament

 

Take James Madison's classic summary of militarism's even then recognized evils:

 

 

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

 

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

 

In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.

 

The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.

 

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

 

James Madison, Political Observations, Apr. 20, 1795 — in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume 4, 1865 (at page 491) (paragraph split)

 

 

No one familiar with the whys and wherefores of the American constitution can legitimately pretend not to be aware of Madison's misgivings about expansive militarism.

 

 

From a blame-dispensing perspective, this means that

 

Crassly stated, decades recent general officers who swore to uphold the Constitution are (pick one):

 

 

diligently unaware of the geopolitical effects of their doings,

 

"generalized" ignoramuses,

 

self-serving proponents of bureaucratically delicious expansionism,

 

closet totalitarians,

 

psychotic paranoids,

 

or (unlikely) —

 

just idiots.

 

 

Certainly, compared to the best of their past equivalents — George Washington and George C. Marshall spring to mind — more recent crops of our general officer ilk are illustriously unimpressive. This is so according to any reasonable standard that one wishes to impose, whether it be strategic victory in war or institutional and constitutionally based excellence.

 

 

However — is such a condemnation a fair one?

 

Obviously not, at least in some respects.

 

You don't pick your "steely-eyed" killers for their societal, philosophical and spiritual insights.

 

If criticism of American militarism is to be fairly attributed, I think it needs to aim at our civilian leadership. Which, if anything, has been even more incompetently unaware of History and Present than its military equivalent.

 

Our disease is a cultural one. We worship war, killing, expansionism, and hypocritically concealed looting. Our actions derail the Constitution's war-constraining parameters under the guise of paranoid self-defense.

 

Illustrating the latter argument, what do you think the Founders would have thought about waging preemptive war in the manner the United States has been doing recently?

 

A step ethically and politically too far, perhaps?

 

 

The moral? — Seeing forests is a necessary strategic skill

 

Secret (and therefore unaccountable) American commandos are operating in 70 percent of the planet's nations.

 

What supremely expensive, violence-encouraging and soul-destroying nonsense are we smoking? (This is a pun that cuts several ways.)

 

James Madison and team would not be pleased with what we have done to their society-building effort. The Constitution's intent sits forlorn like a cicada's abandoned husk.

 

 

Note

 

With that closing statement, I do not intend to pedestal-ize the Founders. The elites that their Constitution empowered remain so today. The ills that I see in today's United States can be traced (in initial implementation) to that document and to the people who crafted it.

 

What is striking, even so, is just how much of constitution's arguably more well-intended facets have been stripped away. American militarism is just one of these constraint-gnawing vermin.