From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith, 2014 - As a general rule, I like to have a little time to get ready for the next global crisis. Stuff like deciding which side I’m on, how to pronounce the participants’ names and so forth. While I know some people get turned on by rapid developments, and it does save Wolf Blitzer from having to spend so much on Viagra, but for others it’s a bit like turning into the wrong movie theater auditorium and finding huge pink and orange monsters leaping at you when you expected to find a reflective Judy Dench.
I know sometimes – as with 9/11 – it can be a little difficult to forecast these things, but I gather, just for example, that Hillary Clinton was stirring up the Ukraine thing back when she was Secretary of State and the CIA was secretly encouraging various protests in Venezuela. They forgot to tell us.
Even George Bush gave us more days to think about invading Iraq. And there was a time – way back in the early 1940s- when a president actually went to Congress and got it to declare war before we found ourselves involved in a major international conflict. But observing the constitutional requirement went out of style and our presidents increasingly acted like the people we were supposed to be horrified by.
The Vietnam disaster was a real blow: Nearly 60,000 American deaths for reasons no one could adequately explain. But the cutback in deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t work either. In part, a younger generation had come to see war as an electronic game to play rather than a reality in which to perish.
Now Barack Obama sits on a sofa watching David Letterman as he decides during commercials which wedding in Pakistan to disrupt with drones, The front line and the Iron Curtain have disappeared – instead, and unnoted in the media, we now have troops in 150 countries. Meanwhile the State Department and CIA search for surrogate victims – aka protestors – to bring down regimes it doesn’t like. And even the Pentagon is adapting.
William Hartung of the Center for international Policy notes:
“Secretary of Defense Hagel said that we should no longer size U.S. military forces to engage in ‘prolonged conflicts’ like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so, he was essentially acknowledging the fact that spending trillions of dollars and losing thousands of lives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not made anyone safer. The majority of Americans understand this, and won’t support similar interventions any time soon.”
The downside of the rise in boutique warfare is that we no longer know which battles we’re about to enter and nobody asks us what we think about it.
On the plus side, boutique warfare can result in far fewer deaths. But given the nearly one hundred percent failure in judgment of those who have chosen our conflicts over the past half century, you really don’t want Hillary Clinton and Zig Brzezinski helping to create a potentially disastrous conflict with Russia without at least a few public opinions, say, from real Ukraine experts.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Ukraine.
They sound more like destinations for the British empire in its final days rather than displays of American exceptionalism.
The problem with boutique warfare is not only that it is bad strategy, unconstitutional and has the potential to explode into far more serious conflict, it is designed by those who have an extraordinary record of error.
They are, thus, not only dumb but dumb and dangerous, and that’s a deadly combination.
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