Not new. Big? Sorta, although these things can be made to blend into the background noise if your media is compliant.
2.
RobertB
Capabilities create intentions.
3.
Omnes Omnibus
There are realist arguments that can be made for some of the interventions of the past 20 years. Avoiding destabilization is a big one (Bosnia and Kosovo). Getting on the right side of an up and coming movement (Libya) is another. FWIW Iraq is the major exception. I am not saying that LIs and neocons weren’t the driving force; just that a realist foreign policy does not necessarily equal an isolationist or even non-interventionist foreign policy.
4.
Poopyman
Did I mention that war is profitable too? Maybe not for thee and me, but we don’t count in the oligarchy.
5.
Poopyman
@RobertB: Well, we’ve got all of these cruise missiles stacked in the corner, and more are coming off the assembly line all of the time. Use ’em up! Move ’em out!
Not new. Big? Sorta, although these things can be made to blend into the background noise if your media is compliant.
This.
Hasn’t every president or very nearly committed troops to interventions in some place or other? We all know about World War Two and the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. But before that, you had all the interventions in Latin America and Asia (what Smedley Butler called “the racket” on behalf of Wall Street), and before that the Indian wars. We’ve never been shy about using our military.
12.
Ghanima Atreides
Neoconservatives of both parties urge war to spread American ideals, seeing it as the duty of a great nation.
The vasty problem is that this is impossible in majority muslim nations where the consent of the governed mandates shariah law.
Because of resistance to proselytization. An example of modern resistance to proselytization is contemporary shariah law– shariah forbids proselytization, and freedom of speech legalizes proselytization. Westernstyle democracy encodes freedom of speech. So Islam and westernstyle or missionary democracy are incompatible in majority muslim nations where the consent of governed is established by a muslim electorate.
When Islam evolved to be resistant to christian proselytization, that conferred a general immunity to other types of of proselytization, like say…..the brand of missionary democracy the US has been trying to spread in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ten years and trillion dollars later, I doubt the US has a single convert to missionary democracy.
But Cole, it is basically dishonest to compare the Bush Doctrine and COIN to Humanitarian Imperialism and Right to Protect Doctrine.
Those are entirely different things.
13.
geg6
Pretty much any reading of US history shows that we have always been at war or fomenting the next one. Liberal, conservative, whomever is in office. That is what America does. I just can’t too excited by this stale argument that, somehow, today is any different than the past.
14.
ppcli
@cleek: The 1930s. Pffftt… the decade of appeasement.
15.
Just Some Fuckhead
Here come the war pigs with the tired refrain of “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”
16.
Mandramas
@Chris: I agree. In general, any big country have to devise ways to maintain busy the permanent army. A bored army is a risky business.
Ideologically, the George H.W. Bush administration should not have been inclined toward military intervention. Bush senior was a reluctant intervener, the National Security Council was guided by eminent realist Brent Scowcroft, and Colin Powell, the author of an eponymous doctrine that urges extreme caution in going to war, headed up the Joint Chiefs. And yet the administration launched three major military operations in its four-year term: the Panama invasion (derided by many as Operation Just ‘Cause), the first Gulf War, and the Somalia intervention.
Honestly Cole, you link to this crap early in the morning? At least give some of us time to wake up so that we can make fun of you proper.
18.
Mandramas
@ppcli: The decade of the great depression, as far as I remember. No country is is more pacifist that a depressed country. Check Weimar republic.
@ppcli:
…i got cut off! :(
even in the 30’s we were occupying Haiti and Nicaragua.
20.
cat48
Don’t you think the real problem is that the US is supposedly the “World’s policeman”?? The anchors on msnbc this a.m. are asking why Obama “has not asked Assad to go, yet??” He’s just been doing stern statements. A country really has to know it’s limitations. No more please!
A profoundly misleading, tendentious and ahistorical article. It may be the worst thing Ive ever seen Joyner do.
22.
RP
His argument that we’ve been at war for 20 years is pretty weak. How were the actions during the Clinton administration any different from Grenada, Panama, and Lebanon? Same as it ever was.
The only significant change in US foreign policy in the last 20-30 years was the decision to stage a full on invasion of another country based on a series of lies.
23.
TheMightyTrowel
I was led to re-investigate the Progressive Party of the early 20th century this morning after my partner spent an hour complaining that UK pols have picked up the term ‘progressive’ from the Obots without ever bothering to define it. Turns out even the progressive party was for permanent war: part of their 1912 platform required 2 battleships to be built every year.
As was Ike. Two insiders who knew what they were talking about.
25.
Just Some Fuckhead
Wow, this is more interesting than the Burkean debate over Hayekian principles. Can we just cut the bullshit and admit war is easy and fun as long as the credit card doesn’t run out and other people do the dying?
In a widely discussed March essay, Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt wrote of a “neocon-liberal alliance” in support of war, contending, “The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance.”
The Progressive Policy Institute’s Jim Arkedis, who describes himself as a “progressive internationalist,” calls this notion of a neocon-liberal alliance “bunk.” Neocons, according to Arkedis, “disdain multilateral diplomacy and overestimate the efficacy of military force” in a way that “saps the economic, political, and moral sources of American influence.” He adds, “Though our ends are similar, our thresholds for intervention, our military methodology, and our justifications for action could not be more different.”
More like the decade of the Good Neighbor policy (pulling troops out of Haiti and Nicaragua, abolishing Platt Amendment re Cuba, etc). It was a good move. Too bad it didn’t survive the Cold War.
27.
Dr.BDH
1991 is an arbitrary starting point for America’s endless wars. They actually started in the 19th century with the wars with Mexico and Spain, followed by excursions in Central America, then WWI. We took a break for the Great Depression, but with WWII we got into militarization big time, followed up by Korea. Eisenhower was the last president to warn against militarism. Starting with Kennedy (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam), every American president has started or continued at least one war, usually without bothering to have Congress constitutionally declare it.
It is not a coincidence that the rise of oligarchy capitalism follows a similar trajectory: building through the latter 19th century, taking a breather during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration (an atypical contrast of increased imperialism and regulation), struggling during the Great Depression, weakest during the Eisenhower administration (top tax rate 90%), and growing ever since.
For Democrats and Republicans alike, the themes of American polity the last 150 years have been militaristic imperialism and oligarchy capitalism. It’s like apple pie and Mother, with guns and income disparity!
28.
tomvox1
Bring back the draft and 2 years of compulsory military service (and make it difficult to avoid service for bullshit reasons like “I’m in college!”) and this impulse to intervene militarily will be curtailed tout suite.
Pursuant to this, I have always thought 2 years of mandatory national service after high school, whether military or domestic public service (mandatory Americorps if you like), would be the best way to get citizens in this country to really think that they are part of a greater whole with responsibilities not merely to themselves. Young people could earn money for college or trade school while serving the nation. Isn’t this one of reasons the Israelis all feel part of something bigger than themselves? Or the Norwegians for that matter? In the US, we have the freedom to feel like it’s some other sucker’s job to do all the difficult tasks because we are never asked to do anything difficult ourselves anymore…except to go shopping. (I know, I know…Obama’s Brownshirt army!)
29.
Poopyman
@TheMightyTrowel: Well, at least you got the Battle of Jutland out of it.
The only significant change in US foreign policy in the last 20-30 years was the decision to stage a full on invasion of another country based on a series of lies.
make that 50 years and you can include some Gulf of Tonkin goodness.
31.
Poopyman
@Dr.BDH: Don’t stop there. This country was born of war, starting in 1620. War with the natives continued until what? The late 1880s? To a small colony or a young country, these things were both a drain and an opportunity.
32.
RP
@cleek: Oh sure. And I agree with post 27 that this trend really dates back to the 19th century. But I was just pointing out that drawing a distinction between the 80’s and 90’s makes no sense whatsoever.
33.
Omnes Omnibus
@Poopyman: Why chose 1620? Roanoke and Jamestown were earlier.
1991 is an arbitrary starting point for America’s endless wars.
But a popular one. Reason being that it’s the first time there was no superpower in front of us. In the old days, you could justify intervention by saying “oh, it’s important, we’re just making sure this or that place doesn’t fall into the hands of the communists/fascists/European colonial empires.” After 1991, with no enemy on the horizon, a lot of people started wondering why the hell we were still doing interventions.
35.
ppcli
As Bob Dylan said many years ago:
A lot of people don’t have much food on their table
But they got a lot of forks ’n’ knives
And they gotta cut somethin’
36.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Being popular doesn’t make it right. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
37.
Kane
I sense a narrative shift. The criticisms of Obama foreign policy have morphed into the argument that Obama policy is nothing more than an extension of Bush policy.
Being popular doesn’t make it right. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
Didn’t say it was right. Explained why it was so often used (erroneously) as a starting point. Before 1991, it was a lot easier to rationalize intervention than after.
41.
Dr.BDH
@Poopyman:
I agree that the wars of extermination both before and after the Revolution make us a people who have almost always been warring with someone. I think a distinction can be made between the wars of extermination and the wars of imperialism, but it may be too fine a distinction to matter. There’s also the Civil War, which some Southerners still think of as a Northern imperialistic war, but most sane people recognize was about slavery. The imperial wars since the 1880s have been about the economy — making the world safe for oligarchy capitalism.
42.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: Not, it is not. Bad idea. The next republican president with be tempted to invade north Korea with teenager soldiers. Bad, bad idea. Also, draft is used more to have the entire population with the minimal instruction to be ready to be mobilized in a case of a full scale war. This was deprecated with the invention of nukes.
I sense a narrative shift. The criticisms of Obama foreign policy have morphed into the argument that Obama policy is nothing more than an extension of Bush policy.
Except worse, ‘cuz he sold us out. Obviously.
44.
NickM
You talking about the permanent class war?
45.
MikeJ
Why stop with the American revolution? The US didn’t invent war. There have been wars pretty much non stop as far back as you can go in recorded history.
There’s absolutely nothing new about it. The only thing halfway new about it is that sometimes it’s for a good reason, like stopping a genocide in Bosnia or supporting a democratic movement in Libya.
Bonus points for our wingnuts, left and right, to weave the previous “wimp” slur into the new war monger narrative. Maybe something like “The Dijon Decider” “The Commieander Guy”
@General Stuck: Look. There’s already a lot to make fun of in this post. No need to go inventing stuff. It makes it too hard to keep up.
50.
Mandramas
@MikeJ: Yeah, but previous big countries takes some years of peace once in a while.
51.
Stefan
Starting with Kennedy (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam), every American president has started or continued at least one war, usually without bothering to have Congress constitutionally declare it.
Except, I believe, President Carter. Vietnam was over by the time he took office in 1977, and we engaged in no new wars throughout his term in office (and in fact he managed to avoid war with Iran when it easily could have gone that way).
I sense a narrative shift. The criticisms of Obama foreign policy have morphed into the argument that Obama policy is nothing more than an extension of Bush policy.
I don’t really see this. It looks simply like US Policy starting with Bush I. Yeah, Reagan had a couple small excursions and was still technically fighting the Cold War and had some extracurricular shit going on in South America and Afghanistan but it was almost exclusively self-interest and not this weird notion that we’re responsible for good outcomes in the rest of the world.
The turning point, IMHO, was Bush I building an international case for putting an expansionist Iraq back inside of its borders and succeeding terrifically. If this had not been allowed to happen or had gone horribly wrong (like us going into Baghdad then, for instance) we’d have thought long and hard about the next one and the next one and the next one.
I hear what you’re saying but opinions on this differ and I think it’s time for shared sacrifice if we are perpetually going to be sending our soldiers into multiple theaters around the globe. Moyers, for example, is with me on this:
Nice. One thing that’s just insultingly retarded about this piece is that Joyner disingenuously constructs a distinction (ie., that use of military force since Bush I has been ideologically motivated, not grounded in realism, so take that bitchez!) which isn’t supported by history or the facts. I’ll give him points for attempting Goldberg-level propaganda here, especially his effort to reduce decisions about the use of force to “an emotional hunger dating from the emotion-laden days of the Cold War”. I mean, what kind of fucking moran tries to legitimize blowing up water-treatment plants and schools and hospitals on the grounds that it satisfies an emotional hunger?
Which leads to a second, deeper point: Joyner is a fucking clown.
56.
Mnemosyne
This claim was just plain weird:
In Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and discovery that there was no WMD program to speak of were both accomplished in the first weeks of the war and with a relative handful of American casualties. If these had been our chief concerns we would have left immediately; the apparent U.S. goals in staying on so many years were democracy promotion and nation-building, both ideals the neoconservative White House leadership shared with liberal interventionists.
Joyner actually thinks we stayed in Iraq for democracy promotion and nation building? Really? I think that oil and having control of a country right next to Iran had a whole hell of a lot more to do with it than because Cheney or Rumsfeld decided they wanted to engage in some nation building.
If we were there for nation building, we wouldn’t have been sending Heritage Foundation interns to run the place.
57.
General Stuck
No need to go inventing stuff
What? The entire post is an invention. Though I prefer creative bullshit for my own contribution. You can call it whatever.
His argument that we’ve been at war for 20 years is pretty weak. How were the actions during the Clinton administration any different from Grenada, Panama, and Lebanon? Same as it ever was.
We didn’t stick around for a decade to remake the social institutions in Panama, Lebanon and Grenada.
In Lebanon, we were supposed to be a fraking peace keeping force. Reagan did absolutely the right thing in pulling us out.
59.
MikeJ
@tomvox1: So you and Moyers think there was a shortage of stupid wars when we had a draft?
I’m going to skip the obvious RISK joke and just point out that the Army was seldom bored while there was an entire continent full of Native Americans and Mexicans who were in need of ethnic cleansing so we could grab their land. The bored part came later and by that time the pattern had been set, the only question remaining was which seeminly random boogeymen of the month would fill the role of the scary Other previously occupied by the Red Man. The Spanish Empire was too pathetic to provide much in the way of thrills. The Germans and Japanese had a good run for a while there, followed by the Russians, but now that they’ve settled down into a boring role of making our cars and vodka, we needed somebody new.
US foreign policy makes more sense if you think of it as a badly plotted reality TV series with bombs. The roles are fixed, only the details change from episode to episode. In early 2001 it was looking like it was going to be either the Arabs or the Chinese who would be our next Public Enemy #1, and I guess the Chinese got lucky to be eliminated before the final round of competition in America’s Top Enemy.
61.
General Stuck
Which leads to a second, deeper point: Joyner is a fucking clown.
This kind of talk will only drive Cole to cranky defcon 2. We can expect public crucifixions of various commentariot on the BJ frontpage. Me, I’m getting out my peace beads. The blogs of war have been let loose.
Others have pointed out that this nation has been involved in a shooting war with someone since before it was founded. I’m going to point out something that has changed, though, which I think is important.
Up to around the 1960s the norm was that at least one close family member – at furthest an uncle or a first cousin – was a military veteran. That was truth regardless of wealth, race, etc.
Today, there are large segments of the population who do not have a military veteran in the close family.
There are a lot of consequences, potential and actual, of this change.
64.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Just Some Fuckhead: Because the best outcome would’ve been to allow Saddam Hussein to turn the Middle East into a royal rumble. Wow.
65.
Stillwater
@Mnemosyne: Joyner actually thinks we stayed in Iraq for democracy promotion and nation building? Really?
I think Joyner thinks what you think is wrong here: Both groups were happy to forge on after finding no WMD because it satisfied a deep ideologically motivated emotional hunger. Which makes him look even more stupid.
In the poll, 60% of respondents said they approved of Obama’s job performance, compared to 39% who disapproved. That’s the best rating Obama has received since May 2009 when, riding high after his inauguration, 64% of Americans approved of his job performance.
Read it and weep oppos, wherever you be. Left and Right
Where in the hell did you guys get the notion that the Us Army is something like a Roman Legion…where you have to keep it fighting or they proclaim their commander to be the Emperor and march on Rome?
It, uh, doesn’t work like that anymore. Roman conscripts were often in for twenty year hitches or longer, and they stayed with the same legion. Unsurprisingly, they identifying much more with the legion and their commander then with an Emperor they had never seen.
Most soldiers in the US Army in in for 8 years or less (typically 4 years) and in that time will have been in up to 6 different units (I was in 4 units in 4 years). Generals are thoroughly politicized and co-opted by the Washington establishment…and most of them don’t have an actual combat command under them. Any General who had notions of dictatorship sure as hell couldn’t sell the idea to the rank and file, since he would be obviously be arrested immediately. Therefore, a coup would depend on a small group of conspirators and a small cadre of armed spec op types who could neutralize key members of the government by force…all without somehow summoning the overwhelming response form the rest of the military who are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.
I heard rumors that some folks in the Air Force had discussed putting Clinton under arrest or some such in the 90’s…and the Air Force was far from bored. They just hated his guts. If true, thankfully, it never happened.
68.
RP
@celticdragonchick: I was comparing Reagan and Clinton. I don’t think Clinton got us into any 10 year quagmires.
69.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: Isn’t peace an option? Like, let’s end all the wars, and don’t start new ones. And let the young ones do something productive for the country or the world.
The minimum age could be 19 or 20 but it’s time for everyone to have a stake in our wars and not just on the TeeVee.
Shit, you don’t need the draft. All you need is a rule that sez cable talking heads go first into any conflict.
71.
Stefan
Up to around the 1960s the norm was that at least one close family member – at furthest an uncle or a first cousin – was a military veteran. That was truth regardless of wealth, race, etc.
Actually, that wasn’t the norm from around the 1890s/early 1900s (when the Civil War cohort started dying) up to the 1940s. There wasn’t any sort of peacetime draft from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II, with the exception of World War I, and in that war only about 3 million men (out of a total adult male populatio of about 25 million) were inducted. During that period of American history most men never served in the military and most people didn’t have any family members who were soldiers; soldiering was in fact looked down on as an occupation, and the military was not glorified the way it is today.
It was only the draft in World War II, and the subsequent and relatively unprecedented peacetime draft that continued through the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, that caused a temporary norm of most adult American males having served some time in the military. Historically, it’s an aberration in American history.
Maybe we can start paying for these wars too. That might help drive things home for most people.
73.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Front Line last night was illuminating. They followed around some ‘capture or kill’ squads in Afghanistan. The tactic pisses off the locals but Petreaus/McCrystal think it is the nuts. Its time to leave before we create more monsters- the people who hate us and our troops that have been trained to invade people’s houses at night and kill everybody.
I would just say that that the US draft was discontinued in 1973 and there had only been very limited military conflicts, and nearly all pursued with massive air power and minimal ground commitments, until Afghanistan (which was a war prompted by a direct attack on American soil). But Iraq II shows the limits of an all-volunteer armed forces for prolonged and massive deployment. There is a reason why many say the Iraq II war and occupation, coupled with our endeavors in Afghanistan, has come close to breaking the (all-volunteer) Army. Repeated deployments of the same limited personal in a combat theater are just bad, no two ways about it.
But in many ways, I think this sort of large scale deployment of our modern armed forces to fight a prolonged war was one of the points of the exercise for men like Rumsfeld & Cheney: to condition the American people to accept big wars with the minimum effect on most citizens’ day-to-day lives and to reverse the “Vietnam syndrome” of the citizenry actively curtailing our military adventures. In that regard, at least until recently, it appears they succeeded. And that, I would say, would be in large part to not enough citizens, particularly the middle class, having any skin in the game.
Also: We did not see the same kinds of mass protest against Iraq II that we did during Vietnam, even though Iraq II was an equally stupid endeavor that has gone nearly as badly, because for the most part some other poor bastard was fighting it and the middle class had no chance of being sent into harm’s way so why should they hit the streets when they would only be arrested for someone else’s problem?
Today, there are large segments of the population who do not have a military veteran in the close family.
…
There are a lot of consequences, potential and actual, of this change.
Reply
Here’s an article from 1999 about what it refers to as “postmodern militarism” (http://www.hotpolitics.com/storm.htm), e.g. post-Vietnam, post-All Volunteer Force, risk-free militarism of the kind that’s been building up since the Reagan years. Interesting read. Key definition is reproduced here:
With the end of the draft, however, memories of the less attractive aspects of military service faded into nostalgia. For the most part, and having had little or no first-hand experience with it, the youthful civilian elites who assumed government power in the 1990s were wholly innocent of any genuine understanding of the true nature and powerful imperatives intrinsic to the armed forces. Moreover, these political elites were not antimilitary, despite what many in uniform believed at the time. Of course, few of them considered military people their social or intellectual equals; rather, they viewed the armed forces with the kind of pretentious cordiality usually reserved for faithful servants. What they did appreciate was that the military was extraordinarily competent, and they reveled in the notion that it could be “tasked” to do their bidding.
Where in the hell did you guys get the notion that the Us Army is something like a Roman Legion…where you have to keep it fighting or they proclaim their commander to be the Emperor and march on Rome?
Please cite where I wrote that. You are reading something entirely different into my comment than what I meant, and I think rather distincly different from what I wrote.
My point was that armed forced was frequently required to clear the interior of the continent from the day European colonists first landed on the Eastern seaboard of the US and starting moving west. This process went on for hundreds of years and created a psychological relationship with war embedded in US politics which was difficult to switch off once the internal frontier became a thing of the past. As a result, since roughly 1880, having run out of major threats on our own continent, we’ve gone thru a succession of foreign menaces, some very real and some just plain laughable (e.g. the Spanish Empire? really?). All of this has been to scratch an itch that the civilian population of the US just can’t seem to leave alone. This has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the US Army and its service schedules.
@Omnes Omnibus: Not sure there was armed conflict at that point, although I could be wrong.
81.
Stillwater
Btw, this whole ideologically-driven-two-party-system line of thought proposed by Joyner is just classic libertarian projection. They reflexively believe a) that both political parties (and their supporters) cannot, as a matter of iron-fisted logic, view the world outside of an ideological lens, and b) that libertarians are unique in all the world in that they can view the world objectively. And what does that objectivity reveal? That both parties are inescapably driven by pure ideological concerns. Which is ironic, since there is no more ideologically driven group than libertarians.
But the double irony is that since libertarians cannot view major political parties decision-making outside their own ideological filter (ie., that both parties are irreducibly ideological), they always get the basic facts at play in any political context wrong. Mind-bogglingly wrong.
Isn’t peace an option? Like, let’s end all the wars, and don’t start new ones. And let the young ones do something productive for the country or the world.
Without a doubt, peace is the best option. And as I said above, a mandatory period of service would also include a non-military option for tasks like infrastructure, disaster relief and other domestic service. Maybe even combat support operations that used to be done by the military but have now mostly been privatized (usually to the benefit of Halliburton/KBR), such as mess services, base construction, sanitation, etc.
But we’re always going to need a standing army; better to have everyone share that load, IMHO. And I strongly feel that would lead to less military adventurism.
This is similar to the way that the small, technologically complex and expensive (for that era) long-service professional armies of the major European powers were thought of and used in 18th Century, as pieces on a chessboard.
In a widely discussed March essay, Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt wrote of a “neocon-liberal alliance” in support of war, contending, “The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance.”
That second part seems to be a rather large caveat, but another ever so mysterious similarity between neoconservative and liberal interventionist civilian leaders is that very few of them ever actually served in the armed services.
85.
Stillwater
@Bob Loblaw: That second part seems to be a rather large caveat,
Maybe. The distinction may be one that holds in theory, but in practice even the neocons recruit coalitions to ‘legitimate’ military intervention.
86.
DZ
@tomvox1:
Excuse me, but no draft. If we try to go there, I guarantee you that millions of older boomers will come out of the woordwork and shove this wretched idea right back down your throat. I would be willing to bet that you are not old enough to have faced the draft during a criminal war like Vietnam. I am. Sure didn’t stop Johnson and it wouldn’t have stopped Bush 2.
And none of that even addresses the idea that involuntary servitude of any kind sucks.
87.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: In a large part, I agree with your last comment. A lot of countries in the history trended to the mercenary system in prosperity, and pursued quick, small piracy wars since it’s profitable. It is more hard with a draft system, since you have to choose a large and real enemy, one that the people can feel the necessity to mobilize against. Vietnam was a special case since it combined a large mobilization with a draft, with a enemy that was not so felt like an enemy (even if they were backed by USSR), with a potential nuclear war in the middle. In the actual quasi-recession scenario, to shift to draft model will probably trigger the end of the unnecessary wars.
The problem is, it is very difficult to reinstate a draft system if there are not an potential enemy and a sizable prospect of full scale war. And, in an age of nukes, full scale wars have a totally diferent meaning. So, go back to a draft it is almost impossible.
Even there, military could be used as a PWA equivalent; the problem is Halliburton-like contractors are so entwined with the military that it could be a hard nut to crack.
88.
Omnes Omnibus
@Poopyman: There were conflicts between colonists and the indigenous people. Look at the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.
89.
Mandramas
@Omnes: So, what is your explanation to the Roanoke’s banishment?
90.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandramas: The disappearance of the colony? I have no idea.
Yeah but also very depressing.
Again with Petraeus telling us how we are winning…if we just keep at it.
92.
ornery curmudgeon
Actually a ‘liberal interventionist’ is not a liberal at all, but are acting as cover for warmongering assh-
Oh wait, that’s not the Right song … yup BOTH SIDES DO IT!!! BOTH SIDES!!! There are 2, one for each dimension of our world … and THEY BOTH ARE THE SAME.
Not to be a douche, but one could make the case that the protests spawned by having a draft of middle class citizens did, indirectly at least, stop LBJ:
Your surmise about my age is correct but I am also proposing closing the infamous deferment loopholes of the Vietnam era for a more universal national service (both military and non-military). I think not having the draft has helped people forget just how horrible wars are, not to mention remove from them any sense of shared sacrifice, and enabled the gung ho armchair general bullshit of Iraq II, where at first a large majority supported the war but always a very small minority were in fact eligible to fight it.
94.
Comrade Luke
The sub-headline, or whatever it’s called, starts:
Since the last realist president, George H.W. Bush, left office
lolwut?
Yea, former head of the CIA George H.W. Bush: the last realist president.
Keee-rist.
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Poopyman
Not new. Big? Sorta, although these things can be made to blend into the background noise if your media is compliant.
RobertB
Capabilities create intentions.
Omnes Omnibus
There are realist arguments that can be made for some of the interventions of the past 20 years. Avoiding destabilization is a big one (Bosnia and Kosovo). Getting on the right side of an up and coming movement (Libya) is another. FWIW Iraq is the major exception. I am not saying that LIs and neocons weren’t the driving force; just that a realist foreign policy does not necessarily equal an isolationist or even non-interventionist foreign policy.
Poopyman
Did I mention that war is profitable too? Maybe not for thee and me, but we don’t count in the oligarchy.
Poopyman
@RobertB: Well, we’ve got all of these cruise missiles stacked in the corner, and more are coming off the assembly line all of the time. Use ’em up! Move ’em out!
cleek
there hasn’t been a decade in which the US hasn’t been involved in some kind of war, armed conflict, or military occupation ever. only in the 1930s
Mandramas
@Poopyman: Three letter acronym: MIC. War is a business, a profitable one.
MattF
Um, anyone here ever heard of Leo Strauss? If you’re going to bring up the subject of Permanent War…
Culture of Truth
You know there’s a Democrat in the White House when this is headline news:
U.S. Defends Killing of Bin Laden
Just Some Fuckhead
Smedley Butler is a prophet.
Chris
@Poopyman:
This.
Hasn’t every president or very nearly committed troops to interventions in some place or other? We all know about World War Two and the Cold War and the post-Cold War era. But before that, you had all the interventions in Latin America and Asia (what Smedley Butler called “the racket” on behalf of Wall Street), and before that the Indian wars. We’ve never been shy about using our military.
Ghanima Atreides
The vasty problem is that this is impossible in majority muslim nations where the consent of the governed mandates shariah law.
Because of resistance to proselytization. An example of modern resistance to proselytization is contemporary shariah law– shariah forbids proselytization, and freedom of speech legalizes proselytization. Westernstyle democracy encodes freedom of speech. So Islam and westernstyle or missionary democracy are incompatible in majority muslim nations where the consent of governed is established by a muslim electorate.
When Islam evolved to be resistant to christian proselytization, that conferred a general immunity to other types of of proselytization, like say…..the brand of missionary democracy the US has been trying to spread in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ten years and trillion dollars later, I doubt the US has a single convert to missionary democracy.
But Cole, it is basically dishonest to compare the Bush Doctrine and COIN to Humanitarian Imperialism and Right to Protect Doctrine.
Those are entirely different things.
geg6
Pretty much any reading of US history shows that we have always been at war or fomenting the next one. Liberal, conservative, whomever is in office. That is what America does. I just can’t too excited by this stale argument that, somehow, today is any different than the past.
ppcli
@cleek: The 1930s. Pffftt… the decade of appeasement.
Just Some Fuckhead
Here come the war pigs with the tired refrain of “We have always been at war with Eastasia.”
Mandramas
@Chris: I agree. In general, any big country have to devise ways to maintain busy the permanent army. A bored army is a risky business.
slag
Honestly Cole, you link to this crap early in the morning? At least give some of us time to wake up so that we can make fun of you proper.
Mandramas
@ppcli: The decade of the great depression, as far as I remember. No country is is more pacifist that a depressed country. Check Weimar republic.
cleek
@ppcli:
…i got cut off! :(
even in the 30’s we were occupying Haiti and Nicaragua.
cat48
Don’t you think the real problem is that the US is supposedly the “World’s policeman”?? The anchors on msnbc this a.m. are asking why Obama “has not asked Assad to go, yet??” He’s just been doing stern statements. A country really has to know it’s limitations. No more please!
Elias Isquith
A profoundly misleading, tendentious and ahistorical article. It may be the worst thing Ive ever seen Joyner do.
RP
His argument that we’ve been at war for 20 years is pretty weak. How were the actions during the Clinton administration any different from Grenada, Panama, and Lebanon? Same as it ever was.
The only significant change in US foreign policy in the last 20-30 years was the decision to stage a full on invasion of another country based on a series of lies.
TheMightyTrowel
I was led to re-investigate the Progressive Party of the early 20th century this morning after my partner spent an hour complaining that UK pols have picked up the term ‘progressive’ from the Obots without ever bothering to define it. Turns out even the progressive party was for permanent war: part of their 1912 platform required 2 battleships to be built every year.
Poopyman
@Just Some Fuckhead:
As was Ike. Two insiders who knew what they were talking about.
Just Some Fuckhead
Wow, this is more interesting than the Burkean debate over Hayekian principles. Can we just cut the bullshit and admit war is easy and fun as long as the credit card doesn’t run out and other people do the dying?
Chris
@ppcli:
More like the decade of the Good Neighbor policy (pulling troops out of Haiti and Nicaragua, abolishing Platt Amendment re Cuba, etc). It was a good move. Too bad it didn’t survive the Cold War.
Dr.BDH
1991 is an arbitrary starting point for America’s endless wars. They actually started in the 19th century with the wars with Mexico and Spain, followed by excursions in Central America, then WWI. We took a break for the Great Depression, but with WWII we got into militarization big time, followed up by Korea. Eisenhower was the last president to warn against militarism. Starting with Kennedy (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam), every American president has started or continued at least one war, usually without bothering to have Congress constitutionally declare it.
It is not a coincidence that the rise of oligarchy capitalism follows a similar trajectory: building through the latter 19th century, taking a breather during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration (an atypical contrast of increased imperialism and regulation), struggling during the Great Depression, weakest during the Eisenhower administration (top tax rate 90%), and growing ever since.
For Democrats and Republicans alike, the themes of American polity the last 150 years have been militaristic imperialism and oligarchy capitalism. It’s like apple pie and Mother, with guns and income disparity!
tomvox1
Bring back the draft and 2 years of compulsory military service (and make it difficult to avoid service for bullshit reasons like “I’m in college!”) and this impulse to intervene militarily will be curtailed tout suite.
Pursuant to this, I have always thought 2 years of mandatory national service after high school, whether military or domestic public service (mandatory Americorps if you like), would be the best way to get citizens in this country to really think that they are part of a greater whole with responsibilities not merely to themselves. Young people could earn money for college or trade school while serving the nation. Isn’t this one of reasons the Israelis all feel part of something bigger than themselves? Or the Norwegians for that matter? In the US, we have the freedom to feel like it’s some other sucker’s job to do all the difficult tasks because we are never asked to do anything difficult ourselves anymore…except to go shopping. (I know, I know…Obama’s Brownshirt army!)
Poopyman
@TheMightyTrowel: Well, at least you got the Battle of Jutland out of it.
(I’m not saying that’s a good thing, of course.)
cleek
@RP:
make that 50 years and you can include some Gulf of Tonkin goodness.
Poopyman
@Dr.BDH: Don’t stop there. This country was born of war, starting in 1620. War with the natives continued until what? The late 1880s? To a small colony or a young country, these things were both a drain and an opportunity.
RP
@cleek: Oh sure. And I agree with post 27 that this trend really dates back to the 19th century. But I was just pointing out that drawing a distinction between the 80’s and 90’s makes no sense whatsoever.
Omnes Omnibus
@Poopyman: Why chose 1620? Roanoke and Jamestown were earlier.
Chris
@Dr.BDH:
But a popular one. Reason being that it’s the first time there was no superpower in front of us. In the old days, you could justify intervention by saying “oh, it’s important, we’re just making sure this or that place doesn’t fall into the hands of the communists/fascists/European colonial empires.” After 1991, with no enemy on the horizon, a lot of people started wondering why the hell we were still doing interventions.
ppcli
As Bob Dylan said many years ago:
A lot of people don’t have much food on their table
But they got a lot of forks ’n’ knives
And they gotta cut somethin’
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: Being popular doesn’t make it right. If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?
Kane
I sense a narrative shift. The criticisms of Obama foreign policy have morphed into the argument that Obama policy is nothing more than an extension of Bush policy.
Culture of Truth
Don’t forget Urgent Fury!
General Stuck
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Kind of early to start your usual clown show fuckhead. Will there be matinees later on?
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Didn’t say it was right. Explained why it was so often used (erroneously) as a starting point. Before 1991, it was a lot easier to rationalize intervention than after.
Dr.BDH
@Poopyman:
I agree that the wars of extermination both before and after the Revolution make us a people who have almost always been warring with someone. I think a distinction can be made between the wars of extermination and the wars of imperialism, but it may be too fine a distinction to matter. There’s also the Civil War, which some Southerners still think of as a Northern imperialistic war, but most sane people recognize was about slavery. The imperial wars since the 1880s have been about the economy — making the world safe for oligarchy capitalism.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: Not, it is not. Bad idea. The next republican president with be tempted to invade north Korea with teenager soldiers. Bad, bad idea. Also, draft is used more to have the entire population with the minimal instruction to be ready to be mobilized in a case of a full scale war. This was deprecated with the invention of nukes.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kane:
Except worse, ‘cuz he sold us out. Obviously.
NickM
You talking about the permanent class war?
MikeJ
Why stop with the American revolution? The US didn’t invent war. There have been wars pretty much non stop as far back as you can go in recorded history.
There’s absolutely nothing new about it. The only thing halfway new about it is that sometimes it’s for a good reason, like stopping a genocide in Bosnia or supporting a democratic movement in Libya.
General Stuck
@Omnes Omnibus:
Bonus points for our wingnuts, left and right, to weave the previous “wimp” slur into the new war monger narrative. Maybe something like “The Dijon Decider” “The Commieander Guy”
slag
@Chris: Good explanation. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.
maye
Don’t forget all these good folks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors
We are Sparta until we’re not.
slag
@General Stuck: Look. There’s already a lot to make fun of in this post. No need to go inventing stuff. It makes it too hard to keep up.
Mandramas
@MikeJ: Yeah, but previous big countries takes some years of peace once in a while.
Stefan
Starting with Kennedy (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam), every American president has started or continued at least one war, usually without bothering to have Congress constitutionally declare it.
Except, I believe, President Carter. Vietnam was over by the time he took office in 1977, and we engaged in no new wars throughout his term in office (and in fact he managed to avoid war with Iran when it easily could have gone that way).
Just Some Fuckhead
@Kane:
I don’t really see this. It looks simply like US Policy starting with Bush I. Yeah, Reagan had a couple small excursions and was still technically fighting the Cold War and had some extracurricular shit going on in South America and Afghanistan but it was almost exclusively self-interest and not this weird notion that we’re responsible for good outcomes in the rest of the world.
The turning point, IMHO, was Bush I building an international case for putting an expansionist Iraq back inside of its borders and succeeding terrifically. If this had not been allowed to happen or had gone horribly wrong (like us going into Baghdad then, for instance) we’d have thought long and hard about the next one and the next one and the next one.
slag
@Stefan: And look where that got him.
tomvox1
@Mandramas:
I hear what you’re saying but opinions on this differ and I think it’s time for shared sacrifice if we are perpetually going to be sending our soldiers into multiple theaters around the globe. Moyers, for example, is with me on this:
The minimum age could be 19 or 20 but it’s time for everyone to have a stake in our wars and not just on the TeeVee.
Stillwater
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Nice. One thing that’s just insultingly retarded about this piece is that Joyner disingenuously constructs a distinction (ie., that use of military force since Bush I has been ideologically motivated, not grounded in realism, so take that bitchez!) which isn’t supported by history or the facts. I’ll give him points for attempting Goldberg-level propaganda here, especially his effort to reduce decisions about the use of force to “an emotional hunger dating from the emotion-laden days of the Cold War”. I mean, what kind of fucking moran tries to legitimize blowing up water-treatment plants and schools and hospitals on the grounds that it satisfies an emotional hunger?
Which leads to a second, deeper point: Joyner is a fucking clown.
Mnemosyne
This claim was just plain weird:
Joyner actually thinks we stayed in Iraq for democracy promotion and nation building? Really? I think that oil and having control of a country right next to Iran had a whole hell of a lot more to do with it than because Cheney or Rumsfeld decided they wanted to engage in some nation building.
If we were there for nation building, we wouldn’t have been sending Heritage Foundation interns to run the place.
General Stuck
What? The entire post is an invention. Though I prefer creative bullshit for my own contribution. You can call it whatever.
celticdragonchick
@RP:
We didn’t stick around for a decade to remake the social institutions in Panama, Lebanon and Grenada.
In Lebanon, we were supposed to be a fraking peace keeping force. Reagan did absolutely the right thing in pulling us out.
MikeJ
@tomvox1: So you and Moyers think there was a shortage of stupid wars when we had a draft?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Mandramas:
I’m going to skip the obvious RISK joke and just point out that the Army was seldom bored while there was an entire continent full of Native Americans and Mexicans who were in need of ethnic cleansing so we could grab their land. The bored part came later and by that time the pattern had been set, the only question remaining was which seeminly random boogeymen of the month would fill the role of the scary Other previously occupied by the Red Man. The Spanish Empire was too pathetic to provide much in the way of thrills. The Germans and Japanese had a good run for a while there, followed by the Russians, but now that they’ve settled down into a boring role of making our cars and vodka, we needed somebody new.
US foreign policy makes more sense if you think of it as a badly plotted reality TV series with bombs. The roles are fixed, only the details change from episode to episode. In early 2001 it was looking like it was going to be either the Arabs or the Chinese who would be our next Public Enemy #1, and I guess the Chinese got lucky to be eliminated before the final round of competition in America’s Top Enemy.
General Stuck
This kind of talk will only drive Cole to cranky defcon 2. We can expect public crucifixions of various commentariot on the BJ frontpage. Me, I’m getting out my peace beads. The blogs of war have been let loose.
Just Some Fuckhead
Stuck, no one is forcing you to participate.
Kirk Spencer
Others have pointed out that this nation has been involved in a shooting war with someone since before it was founded. I’m going to point out something that has changed, though, which I think is important.
Up to around the 1960s the norm was that at least one close family member – at furthest an uncle or a first cousin – was a military veteran. That was truth regardless of wealth, race, etc.
Today, there are large segments of the population who do not have a military veteran in the close family.
There are a lot of consequences, potential and actual, of this change.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
@Just Some Fuckhead: Because the best outcome would’ve been to allow Saddam Hussein to turn the Middle East into a royal rumble. Wow.
Stillwater
@Mnemosyne: Joyner actually thinks we stayed in Iraq for democracy promotion and nation building? Really?
I think Joyner thinks what you think is wrong here: Both groups were happy to forge on after finding no WMD because it satisfied a deep ideologically motivated emotional hunger. Which makes him look even more stupid.
General Stuck
OT
The sixty percent solution
Read it and weep oppos, wherever you be. Left and Right
celticdragonchick
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Where in the hell did you guys get the notion that the Us Army is something like a Roman Legion…where you have to keep it fighting or they proclaim their commander to be the Emperor and march on Rome?
It, uh, doesn’t work like that anymore. Roman conscripts were often in for twenty year hitches or longer, and they stayed with the same legion. Unsurprisingly, they identifying much more with the legion and their commander then with an Emperor they had never seen.
Most soldiers in the US Army in in for 8 years or less (typically 4 years) and in that time will have been in up to 6 different units (I was in 4 units in 4 years). Generals are thoroughly politicized and co-opted by the Washington establishment…and most of them don’t have an actual combat command under them. Any General who had notions of dictatorship sure as hell couldn’t sell the idea to the rank and file, since he would be obviously be arrested immediately. Therefore, a coup would depend on a small group of conspirators and a small cadre of armed spec op types who could neutralize key members of the government by force…all without somehow summoning the overwhelming response form the rest of the military who are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.
I heard rumors that some folks in the Air Force had discussed putting Clinton under arrest or some such in the 90’s…and the Air Force was far from bored. They just hated his guts. If true, thankfully, it never happened.
RP
@celticdragonchick: I was comparing Reagan and Clinton. I don’t think Clinton got us into any 10 year quagmires.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: Isn’t peace an option? Like, let’s end all the wars, and don’t start new ones. And let the young ones do something productive for the country or the world.
Just Some Fuckhead
@tomvox1:
Shit, you don’t need the draft. All you need is a rule that sez cable talking heads go first into any conflict.
Stefan
Up to around the 1960s the norm was that at least one close family member – at furthest an uncle or a first cousin – was a military veteran. That was truth regardless of wealth, race, etc.
Actually, that wasn’t the norm from around the 1890s/early 1900s (when the Civil War cohort started dying) up to the 1940s. There wasn’t any sort of peacetime draft from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of World War II, with the exception of World War I, and in that war only about 3 million men (out of a total adult male populatio of about 25 million) were inducted. During that period of American history most men never served in the military and most people didn’t have any family members who were soldiers; soldiering was in fact looked down on as an occupation, and the military was not glorified the way it is today.
It was only the draft in World War II, and the subsequent and relatively unprecedented peacetime draft that continued through the 1950s, 60s and early 70s, that caused a temporary norm of most adult American males having served some time in the military. Historically, it’s an aberration in American history.
handy
@tomvox1:
Maybe we can start paying for these wars too. That might help drive things home for most people.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Front Line last night was illuminating. They followed around some ‘capture or kill’ squads in Afghanistan. The tactic pisses off the locals but Petreaus/McCrystal think it is the nuts. Its time to leave before we create more monsters- the people who hate us and our troops that have been trained to invade people’s houses at night and kill everybody.
tomvox1
@MikeJ:
“Stupid wars” is a hard thing to quantify.
I would just say that that the US draft was discontinued in 1973 and there had only been very limited military conflicts, and nearly all pursued with massive air power and minimal ground commitments, until Afghanistan (which was a war prompted by a direct attack on American soil). But Iraq II shows the limits of an all-volunteer armed forces for prolonged and massive deployment. There is a reason why many say the Iraq II war and occupation, coupled with our endeavors in Afghanistan, has come close to breaking the (all-volunteer) Army. Repeated deployments of the same limited personal in a combat theater are just bad, no two ways about it.
But in many ways, I think this sort of large scale deployment of our modern armed forces to fight a prolonged war was one of the points of the exercise for men like Rumsfeld & Cheney: to condition the American people to accept big wars with the minimum effect on most citizens’ day-to-day lives and to reverse the “Vietnam syndrome” of the citizenry actively curtailing our military adventures. In that regard, at least until recently, it appears they succeeded. And that, I would say, would be in large part to not enough citizens, particularly the middle class, having any skin in the game.
Also: We did not see the same kinds of mass protest against Iraq II that we did during Vietnam, even though Iraq II was an equally stupid endeavor that has gone nearly as badly, because for the most part some other poor bastard was fighting it and the middle class had no chance of being sent into harm’s way so why should they hit the streets when they would only be arrested for someone else’s problem?
Linnaeus
Silly John Cole. There’s always been a lottery.
Chris
@Kirk Spencer:
Here’s an article from 1999 about what it refers to as “postmodern militarism” (http://www.hotpolitics.com/storm.htm), e.g. post-Vietnam, post-All Volunteer Force, risk-free militarism of the kind that’s been building up since the Reagan years. Interesting read. Key definition is reproduced here:
With the end of the draft, however, memories of the less attractive aspects of military service faded into nostalgia. For the most part, and having had little or no first-hand experience with it, the youthful civilian elites who assumed government power in the 1990s were wholly innocent of any genuine understanding of the true nature and powerful imperatives intrinsic to the armed forces. Moreover, these political elites were not antimilitary, despite what many in uniform believed at the time. Of course, few of them considered military people their social or intellectual equals; rather, they viewed the armed forces with the kind of pretentious cordiality usually reserved for faithful servants. What they did appreciate was that the military was extraordinarily competent, and they reveled in the notion that it could be “tasked” to do their bidding.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@celticdragonchick:
Please cite where I wrote that. You are reading something entirely different into my comment than what I meant, and I think rather distincly different from what I wrote.
My point was that armed forced was frequently required to clear the interior of the continent from the day European colonists first landed on the Eastern seaboard of the US and starting moving west. This process went on for hundreds of years and created a psychological relationship with war embedded in US politics which was difficult to switch off once the internal frontier became a thing of the past. As a result, since roughly 1880, having run out of major threats on our own continent, we’ve gone thru a succession of foreign menaces, some very real and some just plain laughable (e.g. the Spanish Empire? really?). All of this has been to scratch an itch that the civilian population of the US just can’t seem to leave alone. This has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the US Army and its service schedules.
tomvox1
@handy:
Yes, the moment Obama put the wars on the accounting books, we had a horrible deficit/debt crisis that was going to kill us in our beds…so lets dismantle Medicare of course but never, ever raise taxes or stop bombing brown people!
A better corps of journalists would certainly help us all…
danimal
@Mandramas: This thread makes me want to cry. What’s so funny ’bout Peace, Love and Understanding?
Poopyman
@Omnes Omnibus: Not sure there was armed conflict at that point, although I could be wrong.
Stillwater
Btw, this whole ideologically-driven-two-party-system line of thought proposed by Joyner is just classic libertarian projection. They reflexively believe a) that both political parties (and their supporters) cannot, as a matter of iron-fisted logic, view the world outside of an ideological lens, and b) that libertarians are unique in all the world in that they can view the world objectively. And what does that objectivity reveal? That both parties are inescapably driven by pure ideological concerns. Which is ironic, since there is no more ideologically driven group than libertarians.
But the double irony is that since libertarians cannot view major political parties decision-making outside their own ideological filter (ie., that both parties are irreducibly ideological), they always get the basic facts at play in any political context wrong. Mind-bogglingly wrong.
Have I mentioned that Joyner is a clown?
tomvox1
@Mandramas:
Without a doubt, peace is the best option. And as I said above, a mandatory period of service would also include a non-military option for tasks like infrastructure, disaster relief and other domestic service. Maybe even combat support operations that used to be done by the military but have now mostly been privatized (usually to the benefit of Halliburton/KBR), such as mess services, base construction, sanitation, etc.
But we’re always going to need a standing army; better to have everyone share that load, IMHO. And I strongly feel that would lead to less military adventurism.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris:
This is similar to the way that the small, technologically complex and expensive (for that era) long-service professional armies of the major European powers were thought of and used in 18th Century, as pieces on a chessboard.
Bob Loblaw
@Just Some Fuckhead:
That second part seems to be a rather large caveat, but another ever so mysterious similarity between neoconservative and liberal interventionist civilian leaders is that very few of them ever actually served in the armed services.
Stillwater
@Bob Loblaw: That second part seems to be a rather large caveat,
Maybe. The distinction may be one that holds in theory, but in practice even the neocons recruit coalitions to ‘legitimate’ military intervention.
DZ
@tomvox1:
Excuse me, but no draft. If we try to go there, I guarantee you that millions of older boomers will come out of the woordwork and shove this wretched idea right back down your throat. I would be willing to bet that you are not old enough to have faced the draft during a criminal war like Vietnam. I am. Sure didn’t stop Johnson and it wouldn’t have stopped Bush 2.
And none of that even addresses the idea that involuntary servitude of any kind sucks.
Mandramas
@tomvox1: In a large part, I agree with your last comment. A lot of countries in the history trended to the mercenary system in prosperity, and pursued quick, small piracy wars since it’s profitable. It is more hard with a draft system, since you have to choose a large and real enemy, one that the people can feel the necessity to mobilize against. Vietnam was a special case since it combined a large mobilization with a draft, with a enemy that was not so felt like an enemy (even if they were backed by USSR), with a potential nuclear war in the middle. In the actual quasi-recession scenario, to shift to draft model will probably trigger the end of the unnecessary wars.
The problem is, it is very difficult to reinstate a draft system if there are not an potential enemy and a sizable prospect of full scale war. And, in an age of nukes, full scale wars have a totally diferent meaning. So, go back to a draft it is almost impossible.
Even there, military could be used as a PWA equivalent; the problem is Halliburton-like contractors are so entwined with the military that it could be a hard nut to crack.
Omnes Omnibus
@Poopyman: There were conflicts between colonists and the indigenous people. Look at the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.
Mandramas
@Omnes: So, what is your explanation to the Roanoke’s banishment?
Omnes Omnibus
@Mandramas: The disappearance of the colony? I have no idea.
HyperIon
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937:
Yeah but also very depressing.
Again with Petraeus telling us how we are winning…if we just keep at it.
ornery curmudgeon
Actually a ‘liberal interventionist’ is not a liberal at all, but are acting as cover for warmongering assh-
Oh wait, that’s not the Right song … yup BOTH SIDES DO IT!!! BOTH SIDES!!! There are 2, one for each dimension of our world … and THEY BOTH ARE THE SAME.
tomvox1
@DZ:
Not to be a douche, but one could make the case that the protests spawned by having a draft of middle class citizens did, indirectly at least, stop LBJ:
But one could also make the case that Nixon was a lying sack of shit who prolonged the war for his own political benefit, so I see your point to be sure. He did, however, end the draft, which is interesting. Go figure.
Your surmise about my age is correct but I am also proposing closing the infamous deferment loopholes of the Vietnam era for a more universal national service (both military and non-military). I think not having the draft has helped people forget just how horrible wars are, not to mention remove from them any sense of shared sacrifice, and enabled the gung ho armchair general bullshit of Iraq II, where at first a large majority supported the war but always a very small minority were in fact eligible to fight it.
Comrade Luke
The sub-headline, or whatever it’s called, starts:
lolwut?
Yea, former head of the CIA George H.W. Bush: the last realist president.
Keee-rist.