The Repubic of War

So what the hell, exactly, are we doing rushing around the world, acting as if we were under siege from an alien race living at the Earth’s core, popping up in a new hot spot every 15 months? Why have we seen the need to remake our national character and Constitutional principles to bring democracy to Libya? The issue is not “withdrawing from the world”—a solid, reliable, credible, alliance-defending America could still stiffen the global community’s spine at key points without making every new chaotic outbreak its business, and without allowing presidents to claim the right to parachute into any war that struck their fancy.

The Republic of War
by Mike M – 1 February, 2012 – Paradigm Cure

Of all the potential Problems with our Republic that Desperately Need Solving—you know the list; Debt, Deficit, Runaway Entitlements, Runaway Inequality, Economic Crisis Hangover, Infrastructure Collapse, Energy Transition, Education, the God-awful state of popular music—very few analyses focus on the dismal reality that we have become a Push-Button Warmaking State.

The Conventional Wisdomites sigh and roll their eyes every time the likes of Andrew Bacevich give another talk about America’s global ambitions and the wrecking of Constitutional restraints in presidential war powers. Respectable foreign policy journals and magazines hardly publish such irresponsible dreck. But the fact is, we’re now “at war” hither and yon, with no end in sight; and what it means for the Nation, few care to investigate in serious ways. And the issue now is that the problem looks ready to run utterly out of control.

“It’s time to think seriously about intervening in Syria,” writes Steven Cook in a piece at the Atlantic. Which, regardless of the substance of this terrifying article, is a useful title, anyway, because you can shave off the last word, insert a blank, and get a pretty good sense of where we’re at as a nation.

“It’s time to think seriously about intervening in ______.” Shop around at your favorite magazines, op-ed pages, think tank web sites, and blogs, and I dare you to find too many troubled or troublesome states that don’t get nominated to be shoved in there. Cross off Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya; those are our most recently done deals (for now, but perhaps not forever; as Exhibit A in Recurrent Interventionism, I give you Our Good Friend Mr. Haiti). You’ll easily discover Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia, for starters, as long as you are willing to take the term “intervening” in a broad sense (but then, when we start bombing people, engaging in targeted killings in their finer neighborhoods, and helicoptering teams of elite troops to wreak havoc on their society, I would tend to consider that intervention—and, more to the Constitutional and Republican point, “war”).

Other, more radical possibilities, but surely a gleam in some adventurist’s eye: Nigeria, Egypt (chaos demands a response!), Pakistan (lay off, conspiracists, it’s only a provocation); Mexico; and the list goes on. Endless lists, in fact; endless wars, all on one man’s say-so. Not to blame the current occupant, mind you, more than any other—at least for the origins of the trend, though its persistence, and indeed its perfection, is another matter. In a world of persistent war, it’s the state of our Republic. …more