Warfare as practiced by European
nations has been obsolete since World War I. Sometimes the news
travels slowly. There are always sociopaths like Bashar Al-Assad and
Saddam Hussein who don't understand the dark side of power and are
willing to use war to hold on to their positions.
War was already obsolete when an
anarchist's bomb took the life of Austrian Arch-Duke Ferdinand in
1914. The great powers of the day—England, France, Germany, Russia,
Austria—didn't realize the futility of war then, but they were
about to find out.
The great powers developed a system
whereby one power would threaten another with war unless some
condition were met. The weaker side would give in quickly to avoid
being obliterated. But the Great Powers kept on using the threat of
war to get their own way, just as the playground bully shakes his
fist and menaces the other children.
World War I changed all that. The Great
Powers were throwing their military weight around as usual but no one
backed down. Nearly all the countries in Europe became involved in a
deadly conflict which was marked by wide-spread use of poison gas and
the newly invented machine gun. Thirty-seven million people died.
Governments toppled in Germany, Russia, and France. Countries fell
apart—The Ottoman Empire split into numerous small states that are
still causing trouble today: Iraq and Syria were created from
remnants of the Ottoman Empire.
The Great Powers of Europe were humbled
by their losses. They promised never to fight each other again. And
so they didn't, for 20 years, until another huge war broke out
between them that truly engulfed the entire world. More than 60
million people died in that war.
As a result of these 2 disastrous wars, the
European powers gave up trying to bully other nations. They created
the United Nations and signed treaties promising not to attack other
nations without just cause. Today, only one country, the United
States, still believes in Great Power politics. It still threatens
other, weaker countries, and goes to war if its demands aren't met.
Under Presidents Reagan, the two
Bushes, and Clinton, the U.S. continued to attack countries with an
enormous military machine. In 2008, the citizens of the U.S. elected
Barack Obama instead of John McCain as their president, at least
partly because they though Obama would end wars rather than start
them. Obama has ended wars, though not as quickly as we had hoped.
McCain, from his seat in the Senate, kept on urging Obama to start
new wars. But Obama resisted the temptation.
Now, Obama seems to have fallen under
the influence of bad advisors. These advisors, including some in the
military and many in the press, have urged him to attack Syria
because of the atrocities committed by the Syrian government against
its own people. Eventually, Obama decided to attack Syria to “punish”
the regime for using chemical weapons.
Obama forgot that war itself is an
atrocity. If we attack another country to punish it for going to war,
we become the war mongers, the killers of civilians, the agents of
death and destruction. If we attack Syria, the world press will be
filled for years with pictures of victims of American aggression and
our hospitals will be filled with our own wounded soldiers.
Nothing can be achieved by war that
cannot be achieved more cheaply and with less destruction by other
means. Syria's government should be made to pay for its atrocities,
but the people should be spared further suffering at our hands. The
proper forum for punishment is the International Criminal Court,
where Bashar Assad and his cronies will be prosecuted alongside the
perpetrators of violence in Kenya, Uganda, Republic of the Congo,
Central African Republic, and Mali.
The way to deal with Assad and his ilk
is through diplomacy and economic pressure. All of these perpetrators
have bank accounts outside Syria. We should freeze their assets. We
know (or can discover) the companies who are selling them arms. We
should put pressure on those companies to change their ways if they
want to stay in business.
Putin has taken center stage in Syria.
He wants to be considered an important player on the world scene. He
wants Russia to return to her time of greatness. In other words, he
wants to start up the Great Powers game again.
America cannot counter the Putins of
the world if our hands are not clean. We can't credibly attack Syria
for using poison gas if we supplied Saddam Hussein with poison gas to
use against Iran. The Iranians are going to remember that. We can't
credibly attack Assad for murdering his own citizens in a civil war
when we started a war in Iraq that resulted in more than 115,000
civilians killed by violence. It may be that our actions in Iraq were
less intentional than Assad's in Syria. But our intervention in Iraq
was a violation of the UN Charter and an unintentional death is still
a death that would not have happened without U.S. intervention.
Barack Obama came to the Presidency
with little or no foreign policy experience. He had served in the
Senate for only two years. He had drawn attention to himself by
opposing the Iraq War, but had little knowledge of the machinery of
war, armies, weapons, spies. The American war machine was complex,
since the American people were not militaristic but presidents wanted
to carry on war continuously nevertheless.
Obama promised to end the Iraq War and
expand the Afghan War to find Osama Bin Laden. He fell into the traps
set for him by the generals. They told him they would win the Afghan
war with just a few more troops. The Surge, they called it. Obama
believed them and gave his approval to the tactic.
The Surge in Afghanistan was expensive
and gained nothing, no territory, no strategic advantage, no
improvement. After the Surge, Obama stopped approving new initiatives
in Afghanistan and began an inevitable drawdown that would lead to
withdrawal.
Obama was suspicious of his generals,
but he accepted their philosophy of American power. They told him
that America must prove she is a SuperPower. She must impose her will
around the world. If necessary, she must use force, to prove her
strength to her enemies. Then they waited for an opportunity to
become involved in another war.
American militarists believe the
America has a right to attack any country in the world if that
country is harming its citizens or neighbors. Obama certainly knew
international law, which states that any intervention in the affairs
of a sovereign country is a violation. The militarists chose their
issue well. Obama has two daughters and loves them. He was blinded by
his love for the children who lost their lives in Syria. The
militarists were gleeful. They foresaw another decade of war.
But Obama disappointed them. Not only
was the plan illegal, the American people opposed it. He gave up his
plan of revenge. The militarists were stunned. They called him
vacillating and weak. Nicolas Kristof, no militarist, claimed the
American president must keep his word, once given. This is nonsense.
Everyone has the right to change his mind.
So the Great Power theory of foreign
policy is moribund. If America will not play the game, no one will.
The other countries of the world must take up the challenge. Acting
together, they must uphold international law.
War is henceforward obsolete and now
everyone knows it.
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