Tag: war

Categories
Accountability

Boots on the Ground

Our congressional representatives, as well as each and every mouthpiece sent forth to speak for the Obama Administration, all repeat, ad nauseam, the “no boots on the ground” mantra regarding a U.S. military intervention in Syria.

Give them their due: politicians can recite poll-tested phrases better than the best-trained kangaroos.

But I’m decidedly not reassured. Saying “no boots on the ground” while advocating military actions that might trigger the need for ground-stomping boots simply suggests a dangerous naivety about the nature of war among policymakers.

If the situation in Syria is so serious that the United States should launch a military attack, is it really so unthinkable that at some point after intervening directly in an evolving civil war — say if things don’t go so swimmingly — that the circumstances could arise for U.S. soldiers to be placed on the ground in this devastated country?

War isn’t always easy-going and reasonable — or predictable. And firing missiles to blow up things in Syria, almost certainly killing people, is very much an act of war.

Granted, the U.S. can fire Tomahawk missiles destroying targets in Syria from Navy ships sitting safely far away in the Mediterranean Sea. But what if the Syrian government found a way to respond militarily or via a terrorist attack killing large numbers of American soldiers or civilians?

Wouldn’t that lead to a major military response, including the distinct possibility of boots on the ground?

Of course.

Politicians have long needed remedial instruction. Whatever your view on intervening in Syria, shouldn’t we begin with a lesson on actions having consequences?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
too much government

War Costs Ever Mount

War has costs . . . and prices. The costs include everything we give up to wage it, and everything taken away by the violence: lives, property, and (sometimes) sacred honor. The prices include the monetary expenditures that keep on adding up.

A recent Associated Press story warns us that the “Costs of Wars Linger for Over 100 Years.” The U.S. government is still paying for World War I, costing taxpayers $20 million per year. Spending on veterans of World War II peaked in 1991, while the Vietnam conflict still soaks up taxpayer dollars:

A congressional analysis estimated the cost of fighting the war was $738 billion in 2011 dollars, and the post-war benefits for veterans and families have separately cost some $270 billion since 1970. . . .

We can expect the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to take money for scores of years after the cessation of fighting — and let’s hope it does cease, some day.

How long can we continue to pay? Very:

There are 10 living recipients of benefits tied to the 1898 Spanish-American War at a total cost of about $50,000 per year. The Civil War payments are going to two children of veterans — one in North Carolina and one in Tennessee — each for $876 per year.

This may seem idiotic, but it’s inevitable.

One element of the story, not mentioned in the reportage, is something I hear from friends: The Veterans Administration more than accommodates increasing its rolls not merely of the recent wounded, but from ancient veterans who received no war wounds. It’s part of the natural expansion of bureaucracy.

The price of war just goes on and on, and up and up.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
video

Video: Warrior Robots Today and Tomorrow

Let’s put some context to Rand Paul’s concerns about checks and balances vis-a-vis drone strikes. Robots have entered the battlefield. And are about to buzz and boom big time. The future — even the present — is science-fictional.

Categories
ideological culture

Alfred Nobel Rolls Over

The Nobel Committee, having whetted its appetite for absurdity with a long string of goofy Peace Prize Awards, especially but not limited to the 2009 award for Barack Obama (who had done nothing but get elected to earn it), went all the way by giving the 2012 award to the European Union.

Barack Obama went on to become a “war president,” even regularly picking targets for assassination by drone. So, could Europe continue the trend and head straight towards war?

Maybe. Last year, former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe warned that the unions debt crisis could lead to “the explosion of the European Union itself,” and warned of growing nationalism. And violent unrest.

Dire warnings from former heads of state are one thing. Actual military movements are another. And Switzerland seems to be preparing for the worst:

The Swiss defense ministry told CNBC that it doesn’t rule out having to deploy troops in the coming years.

“It’s not excluded that the consequences of the financial crisis in Switzerland can lead to protests and violence,” a spokesperson told CNBC.com. “The army must be ready when the police in such cases requests for subsidiary help.”

Talk about financial contagion!

Cooler heads may prevail, of course. Matthew Feeney, writing at reason.com, notes that the “most obvious argument against the possibility of war is that there are no likely candidates for the part of aggressor.” And Europe hasn’t exactly been engaging in a massive military build-up, unlike before the two world wars.

Alas, that doesn’t preclude massive rioting and uprisings.

Sovereign financial bankruptcy usually follows war, rather than preceding it. I guess that provides something like hope.

This is Common Sense. Im Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The A-Word

The n-word got dropped on MSNBC’s The Cycle this week. The show’s co-host [No First Name] Touré called Mitt Romney’s use of the word “angry” to describe some of the rhetoric coming out of the White House as “the ‘niggerization’ of Obama”:

“You are not one of us, you are like the scary black man who we’ve been trained to fear.”

Naturally this led to a battle between Touré and conservative co-host S.E. Cupp. She took particular issue with the fact that Touré admitted that VP Joe Biden‘s “chains” comments were divisive, but is now calling Romney a “racist” for saying the Obama campaign is “angry.”

“Do you see how dishonest that is?” she asked.

Good question. But here’s a better one: Doesn’t talk of race and code-words obscure the real issue here, anger?

Romney shouldn’t be calling for the Obama administration to be less angry. He should be angry himself, and castigating the president and his crew for being angry at the wrong things.

We should be angry at the continuation of wars, foreign (the Middle East) and domestic (on psychoactive drug use), to the detriment of fiscal stability as well as our civil liberties.

We should be angry that the nation’s pension system has been systematically stripped of its surpluses for 77 years — by politicians in Washington.

We should be angry that federal (along with state) policy has interfered with medicine to such an extent that the most idiotic ideas around — nationalization/socialization — almost seemed plausible to a sizable minority of Americans.

We should be angry that the Democrats pushed through yet another expensive entitlement, “Obamacare,” while the rest of the federal government sunk further into insolvency.

And yes, we should be angry that our leaders can’t stick to decent issues.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

War and Broccoli

The art of polling is similar to almost any effort where interpretation is required: Context is important.

The Reason-Rupe pollsters seem to get this. Their recent survey covers not only a lot of ground (the president’s job performance, possible candidates in the upcoming elections, health care, morality and war) but goes into some depth on a number of the issues covered. For instance, each of Obama’s major challengers is put in the context of several competitive scenarios — Obama vs. Romney, Obama vs. Santorum (the poll was conducted before Santorum dropping out), Obama vs. Gingrich, Obama vs. Paul, etc.— with even possible third-party runs brought in. All very interesting.

The biggest section of the poll concerned health care. These questions also probed alternatives, eliciting opinions explicitly in the context of possible options and outcomes. But the results regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities were especially provocative. Nearly half of Americans tend to favor military action against the country were we to discover that the Iranian government was developing nuclear weaponry. But, when the conflict was considered as a long, dragged-out affair — of the same variety as happened in Iraq — support dwindled, and the numbers opposed to intervention went well over half.

Not shocking. Costs matter. Context matters.

The most amusing element of context in the poll emerged in one pair of questions regarding Obamacare. Is the federal requirement to carry medical insurance unconstitutional? Over 60 percent said yes. But switch that mandate to requiring Americans to buy broccoli and other healthy foods, and those crying “unconstitutional” shot up to 87 percent.

Now that’s Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly ideological culture national politics & policies

Saving the World

Tonight, President Obama will address the nation — perchance to explain the parameters, if there be any, to our nation’s military intervention in Libya. Certainly, no one else in his administration has yet successfully done so, and not for lack of babbling on.

“The bottom line and the president’s view on this,” explained Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough on CNN, “is it’s important to bring the country along.” (Gee, thanks.) “Obviously the president, ah, is solely, ah, has this, ah, responsibility to deploy our troops overseas. . . .”

“We would welcome congressional support,” offered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on ABC’s This Week, “but I don’t think that this kind of internationally authorized intervention . . . is the kind of unilateral action that either I or President Obama were speaking of several years ago.”

A long, long time ago, there were no “humanitarian bombing” campaigns. Had such a cause been proposed, it would have been called war. Our president would have had to not only phone a couple congressmen to chat them up, but actually secure their votes on a declaration of war.

As we wade into our third war in the Middle East, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says, “No, I don’t think it’s a vital interest for the United States.”

Whether you are a dove or a hawk, Republican or Democrat or sane, how is it working out for us that one man can so easily decide to embroil 300 million Americans in war?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies too much government

Dare to Cut

If the Tea Party’s newly elected spokespeople really want to prove they are serious, they must dare to gore a familiar ox.

The best place to start? Pentagon budgets.

It’s not just me saying that. Just as Congress overspends domestically, it overspends militarily, primarily by what Cato Institute’s Downsizing the Federal Government website defines as “overreach”:

We would improve the nation’s security by adopting a more restrained and defensive strategy. We should cut the number of military personnel and reduce overseas deployments to save money and relieve burdens on military families.

But Cato’s a think tank. What say actual, elected Tea Party politicians?

Well, Sen. Tom Coburn recently wrote that “Taking defense spending off the table is indefensible.” Further, Senator Elect Rand Paul has called for a debate in the Senate and House over the war in Afghanistan. He started off by saying that Congress had proved lax in its duty to declare war, and then argued that the debate ten years ago on the Afghanistan intervention was not enough for the war’s continuation. He brought up a list of sensible concerns that require careful discussion.

Tea Party politicians should also see the political value of strategic disengagement from any number of worldwide hotspots. Or funding sinkholes, like Europe. Being the world’s policeman costs us dearly, in more ways than one. Were Republicans to rethink their traditional No Pentagon Budget Left Behind approach, Democrats might have less standing to oppose the domestic cuts that must be made.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.