A discussion broke out this week on the limits of Presidential power and how it is being displayed right now by Obama, in his seeming realization of just how he is being thwarted in his presidential goals. It goes to the limits of power of the US and that’s where it appears to have gone wrong. The only limits of power that the US faces are the restraint that it needs to place on itself, by holding in abeyance, its ability to destroy other nations the way Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and George Bush did during their administrations. War is not the solution of every problem. It is, in fact the solution of almost none.
In my lifetime, and I’m pretty old, the United States has fought in only one just war and that was WWII. By a just war I mean one in which we are attacked and forced to defend ourselves against an aggressor. Interestingly, if you don’t count Granada and the first Gulf War and who really wants to count Granada, WWII is the only war that we definitively won. All the other wars and combat actions that we have been involved in were driven by the goals of our military industrial complex or by issues that were so far distant from national security that it was impossible, even for the most warlike, to justify their execution.
Going to war should not be a substitute for our inability to negotiate beneficial agreements with other nations of the world. We already have tremendous advantages in any kind of international negotiation, all the way from saber rattling to humanitarian aide and if we can’t manage to get an advantage in any kind of negotiated deal with the tools available to us, then we have to replace the guys who are negotiating for us with people who are smarter and better at what they do. This is one of the things we did when we kicked out the Republicans and elected Obama. He seems to have set out on a more peaceful course, at least as regards foreign affairs. Now it remains to be seen if he and his people can live up to their promises. Picking up a gun is never a solution to anything but outright aggression.
Being the toughest guy in the world, and we are definitely that, is not a reason to start shooting at the smallest provocation. Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were scurrilous examples of the misuse of power and ample reason that George Bush and Dick Cheney and all their henchmen should go down in history as models of the wrong kind of use of power. If this was a just world or Obama a stronger leader, both Bush and Cheney would have long ago, gone on trial as war criminals.
But there are situations where the power yielded by the US can be used for good, not just for the gathering of material goods by our corporate criminals. Don’t get me wrong. Not all or even most of the tsars of corporate power are engaged in war mongering for profit, but there are enough of them, busily pushing the military and our easily influenced congress that, historically, most of our military campaigns have been the result of utilizing our power in the pursuit of treasure.
How much better off the world would be if we reserved our military power to help benefit those nations or peoples who were being unjustly oppressed and for whom we could, if it was justified, provide a solution.
But that’s why we went into Iraq, you say; to get rid of Saddam Hussein, a horrendous dictator and oppressor of his people. Yeah that was the excuse, along with fake WMDs, but the real reason was oil. And, oh, by the way; we didn’t have a solution, we only had bombs. Is there anyone except the few religious fanatics that are now in power over there, who really think the people of that desolate country are better off because of our invasion? Have we accomplished anything at all in Afghanistan? We put the Taliban in power because we wanted the Russians to lose a war. Then we found out that the Taliban were, inhuman savages, living by tribal codes right out of the prehistoric era, who didn’t want us there any more than they wanted the Russians. Now, after twelve years of fighting people armed with slingshots, rocks and whatever weapons we gave them, we are finding that we are helpless to do any more with them, than did the Russians. The Russians were smarter than us. It only took them nine years to realize the hopelessness of the situation, throw up their hands and get the hell out.
But Afghanistan is a perfect example of the limits of power. Our mighty war machine after twelve years stands helpless against an untrained, poorly armed, bunch of medieval tribes that we, on paper, should be able to sweep away in a few weeks. Now, a half insane thug, Karzi is dictating to us, when and where we should be getting our troops out of his country. WAKE UP CALL! Ignore this gangster and leave him to the mercy of the Taliban,
When I played football, shortly after WWII, our coaches, at every level used the terms of war to inspire and lead us in the pursuit of victory. That wasn’t a coincidence. You win wars because you have to win them. If you don’t have to win them, you shouldn’t be in them. We didn’t have to win Korea, we didn’t have to win Vietnam, we didn’t have to win Afghanistan or any of the other wars we started in pursuit of gain and we got our asses kicked. The only war, since WWII, that we entered for altruistic purposes and even that was tainted by oil, was in Kuwait and we wiped the floor with Iraq in a few days.
The military, the neocoms and John McCain (you’d think he had enough of war) want us to get into every flash fight that any half-assed bunch of gunman start anywhere in the world, but that isn’t the way to solve the world’s problems, especially when we are basically a country that doesn’t want to even think about the final solution to any problem.
Sure, if we could find a really bad, small country, that was harassing all its neighbors, and just blow it off the planet, that would put the fear of God into all the other little aggressors in places like Iran, Libya, Syria, Central Africa and Somalia but we don’t seem to want to annihilate North Korea and even if we did, we don’t have the stomach to pull the trigger, so let’s forget about that scenario and put some serious thought into negotiation. Sure it’s long and boring and politicians can’t get the ink that generals can when we invade somebody, but it is really the medium of the civilized man and if we want to live in a civilized world we must make it our weapon of first resort.
The name of this blog is the Limits of Power and there are limits, imposed by the fact that we are human beings not animals and as such we are bound by very strong moral concepts that definitely limit what we can and should do. We ignore them a the peril of becoming what we are fighting to stop, which is exactly what has happened to us in any number of weaker countries that we have invaded without the moral grounds to do so.
The big cheese, the power, the bully, is always hated by all he overwhelms. Do we always want to be that guy? We already have the power to destroy the planet and end our species. Do we want to do that? In a few years, mankind will have advanced technologically to a point where we can selectively eliminate those who are causing their fellow man problems. The way we are going, that will be followed by eliminating anyone who appears to be a problem for the state. By that time we had better have solved our need for warlike solutions or we will be in an even worse dilemma than we are now.