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IPFS News Link • United States

D.C.'s war madness

• http://theweek.com

The past week has been an immensely clarifying — and profoundly demoralizing — one in American politics. It has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the country's foreign policy establishment, along with its leading center-right and center-left politicians and pundits, are hopelessly, perhaps irredeemably, deluded about the role of the United States in the world.

From the start of the 2016 Republican primaries on down through Donald Trump's surprise electoral college victory, the transition, and the opening months of his administration, members of this foreign policy establishment and these leading politicians and pundits have been united in expressing dismay and alarm about Trump's lack of temperamental and intellectual fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet the moment Trump gave the order to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all was forgotten and forgiven. Finally Trump became president! Finally he put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his place! Finally the U.S. showed it had moved beyond former President Barack Obama's reluctance to use military force!

It's hard to know where to begin in formulating a response to this outpouring of delight at the thought of Trump giving the order to launch a barrage of deadly weapons at a sovereign nation over 5,000 miles from American shores. But let's start with absolute basics: Launching even one missile at another country is not, as we euphemistically like to presume, a "military action," a "military operation," or even a "humanitarian intervention." It is an act of war. Full stop. That many countries in the world, including Syria, are far too weak to consider launching a retaliatory counter-attack against the United States for such a bombardment is utterly irrelevant. How would a more powerful country — China, for example — respond if we fired even one cruise missile at its territory? How, for that matter, would we respond if China fired just one at us?

The answer is patently obvious: We would respond furiously, and with complete justification, because it would be an act of war. How people who spend their lives thinking about international affairs can write about America's actions in the world without placing this fact at the center of their analysis is nothing short of astonishing — and a confession that their thinking is really a form of ideological propaganda that places the United States in a different category from every other country in the world. (American exceptionalism might be a relatively salutary civic myth, but it is a myth all the same. It has no business playing a role in the policy recommendations of informed analysts.)

Unconvinced? Then consider another basic fact: The aforementioned foreign policy and centrist establishments were united in considering Obama averse to using American military might. Yet during the eight years of his presidency, Obama bombed at least nine countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, the Central African Republic, and the Philippines.

If that's what "reluctance" to use force looks like, I wonder what it would take for these critics to call someone a warmonger.

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