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SubscribeWars are far less of a problem than they have been at any time in human history. Let us be grateful for that.
Much of what war is left for America to fight has to do with Energy and Terrorism.
We are making war against the Taliban so we can control Afghanistan. We want to control it so we can get Bin Laden. He’s a Religious Extremist. He’s also a Saudi. And guess what, they are Religious Extremists, too. They like to donate to “martyrs in the cause,” like… Bin Laden. The money they donate comes from oil. So… cut the supply lines, cripple the enemy.
We will always need to defend ourselves. But we can change our current situation by fixing Energy and Terrorism.
Any politician who tells you we need to fight a full-scale war is probably just incompetent, one who fear mongers as the only way to hide his uselessness. Either that or he’s an Oil Dealer, a Fuel Kingpin who wants you to join his Gang of Thugs.
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History seems to indicate that war is more or less normal. I ran across an article a few days ago (don’t remember where and haven’t confirmed it) that we have spent 47 of our 234 years at war — almost 20%.
I believe what we accomplished in the early years of our recent wars was justified, but to me, war is a broad topic that covers a few very different aspects:
* National Defense (protecting or avenging ourselves)
* Foreign Aid (non-military operations aimed at helping those affected by war)
* Military Support (non-combat operations performed by the US Military)
* Military Operations (direct combat operations performed by the US Military)
How we feel about a particular war really depends on whether we are protecting (or avenging) ourselves or someone else… whether we are fighting someone else’s war or helping them fight their own… whether we are providing necessary (and wanted) humanitarian aid or whether we’re sticking our noses in where we shouldn’t have.
But here’s a couple of questions for you:
* If we fix terrorism, does that change how we look at the energy problem and our role in the global economy?
* Can we fix one independently of the other and still achieve the optimal result?
* If we fix both, how does that change our position as a global power and what should we expect in the form of side effects?
P.S. What scares me more than a politician who believes we need to fight a full-scale war is the one that believes there’s a diplomatic solution to terrorism.
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I don’t think there is a diplomatic solution to terrorism. I think diplomacy is one aspect of implementing what I believe is the solution.
Specifically, I outlined in my original post that we have to make a decision before we can act. We have to decide whether terrorists are Border-less Nation-States, or whether they are Common Criminals. I believe we should decide that they are Common Criminals.
Part of the way we deal today with organized crime is that we cut off their money supply. The American mafia had its heyday during Prohibition, funding itself off illegal booze. Once we made beer legal again, that cut a lot of funding out from under them. We’ve got a veritable war going on in Mexico right now, and why is because of illegal drugs. This is why I called our relationship to oil an addiction. We break our addiction, we cut off the money supply, we remove organized crime’s funding.
The diplomatic part of the solution is the same as we have now for international crime. We have good relationships with entities like Interpol. We have extraction agreements with various countries. The diplomacy we need is not with the terrorists, its with the good guys who want to help us fight them.
By the way, I don’t expect that our cops who are deployed internationally to fight terrorist crime are going to look like your average Mountie. I expect they’ll look a lot like Special Forces units, or drones.
Afghanistan looks to me like policing actions against bad guys and building relationships with good guys, like part of the solution I envision.
Iraq I am not so sure about. To me it looks like maybe we are protecting our addiction to oil. Or maybe we are engaging in one of the “humanitarian” actions you mention. That kind of aid is OK by me, but I’ll ask you to acknowledge that giving is actually a Liberal’s Perspective.
To answer your questions, I don’t think we can fix terrorism without fixing energy. And if we fix energy, that’s only part of the solution to terrorism. If we are the world’s premiere terrorist-fighting force, if we have clean energy technology the rest of the world wants to buy, those seem like pretty good things for America and her position of global leadership.
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