When I Was a Kid, Going to War Was a Big Deal — Now, It Is Just Something We Do

© 2014 Peter Free

 

15 September 2014

 

 

If you are a senior or middle aged, compare then and now

 

War used to be big deal in the United States. Even our creeping involvement in Vietnam raised a good deal of concern among the public.

 

More recently, I remember the mild trepidation that the Gulf War temporarily aroused. For that reason, President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker took pains to make the Kuwait rescue effort seem legitimate. They told us that the US could not let Iraq’s invasion of the smaller country stand. They gave us rationally defensible reasons for thinking they were correct. And they persuaded a bunch of other nations to agree to an actively undertaken joint effort. Afterward, to the Bush One Administration’s farseeing credit, it decided not to topple Iraq, for fear that chaos would result from the political vacuum left behind.

 

In contrast these days, dispensing a few thousand deaths here and there seem “just” to be in the nature of American daily business. If the President wants to fling missiles, bombs and Special Operations around, no one especially influential challenges him. Fear seems to be justification enough for all manner of previously unthinkable American actions.

 

Indeed, it has become as if the United States exists to lumber around, snuffing out lives in an almost random fashion. Virtually no one in our own Homeland gives the routine targeting of American military power at other people(s) much thought. Just tag someone as a terrorist, and reason and winnable strategy seem to flee.

 

 

An embarrassing lack of ethics

 

The argument that terrorists are both wily and bad appears to have removed America’s 20th Century reluctance to shoot things up on a major scale.

 

We have become thoroughly hypocritical about it. For example, journalist James Foley’s beheading is being used to justify (the equivalent of) “Operation Vaporize the Islamic State”. Which Mr. Foley almost certainly would have opposed for moral and geopolitical reasons.

 

Laughably, also, the Administration insists there will be no boots on the ground, despite the fact that our troops are already there as advisors, trainers, and Special Operations Forces. With many more to come.

 

 

Sheer thoughtlessness

 

None of the American push back against terror happens, without putting our troops, ancillary intelligence personnel, and other nations’ populations in death’s way. Yet the gravity of doing these things, as thoughtlessly as we do them, seems to escape most of us.

 

An example of that air headedness is how easily the Administration has sold us on the idea that ISIS/ISIL is the unspoken equivalent of an imminent threat to national security.

 

In reality, the Islamic State group consists of a heavily armed, pseudo-governmental organization running around in a desert that is filled with a combination of poorly armed folk and disorganized cowards.

 

The real threat that the Islamic State poses today was initiated by our foolish toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime that had held “them guys” in check. And now, being unable to figure out how to put the genie back in the bottle, we are dizzily spinning around trying to make other people accept responsibility for our error.

 

A moment’s thought would indicate that even in the Sunni Islamic State succeeds in achieving some of its goals, it is still going to be offset and unbalanced by Shia-led Iran.

 

There is nothing that ISIS is likely to be able to do that will make it more powerful than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was, when it invaded Iran and was stalemated nearly to death.

 

The Islamic State’s odds of far-reaching success are actually worse than Dictator Hussein’s were in 1980, simply because other Sunni elements in the Middle East now oppose them.

 

The whole ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State threat (to the US) thing is fear mongering BS.

 

 

Don’t get me wrong

 

I am in favor of terminating the murderers among ISIS/ISIL.

 

But I recognize that bringing American air power and Special Operations to that task, in the massive and poorly thought out way that President Obama has proposed, is going to achieve nothing and probably make the situation worse.

 

I would have preferred a quieter and more precisely deadly response. Something like those that the mythically powerful KGB and Mossad might have undertaken behind the scenes decades ago.

 

 

There is also Congress’ contributing part in the breakdown of our Constitutional system

 

Congress, that most spineless of American institutions, is currently trying to duck the issue of passing judgment on the President’s plan. This so, for fear that taking a stand against the Commander in Chief’s arguable fecklessness might irritate individual members’ vicariously violent constituencies (in the 2014 midterm elections).

 

Opting out of its Constitutional duty to make war allows both houses of Congress to:

 

(a) blame the President for anticipated failure

 

or

 

(b) to take part in his only remotely likely future success.

 

“You see” — Congress members will be able to say under the latter alternative — “our unvoted approval of his plan was the correct thing to do.”

 

 

The moral? — A broken governmental system aggravates our emotion-based penchant for killing people in pursuit of bad policy and unachievable ends

 

Fury really is a dish best served thoughtfully cold.