State Your Plan

The connecting thread that I see uniting many of this morning’s opinion pieces and our politics more generally is a general reluctance for the authors to say what they actually mean. So, for example, in Max Boot’s Washington Post plea for the U. S. to continue its military activity in Afghanistan and Syria, here’s what he says:

Advocates of retreat will argue that an open-ended deployment is not sustainable. But that’s not true. U.S. troops are volunteers. As long as they aren’t taking many casualties, the public isn’t opposed to their deployment. U.S. forces have suffered six fatalities in Syria and 66 in Afghanistan since 2015 — an average of 18 a year. Those losses are tragic, but in 2017 the U.S. military lost 80 service personnel in training accidents. Training is now four times deadlier for U.S. forces than combat. Nor are these conflicts financially ruinous: The war in Afghanistan accounts for less than 10 percent of the defense budget. If Trump chooses to pull out, it will be his choice. Unlike Richard Nixon in Vietnam, he will not have been compelled to exit by public pressure. There are no antiwar protests in the streets.

These kinds of deployments are invariably lengthy and frustrating. Think of our Indian Wars, which lasted roughly 300 years (circa 1600-1890), or the British deployment on the North West Frontier (today’s Pakistan-Afghanistan border), which lasted 100 years (1840s-1940s). U.S. troops are not undertaking a conventional combat assignment. They are policing the frontiers of the Pax Americana. Just as the police aren’t trying to eliminate crime, so troops are not trying to eliminate terrorism but, instead, to keep it below a critical threshold that threatens the United States and our allies. This isn’t as satisfactory as pursuing unconditional surrender, but, as we may discover before long, it beats the alternative.

but what he rather clearly means is that withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria threatens the American imperium that he wants. The European settlers believed they had a right to the land. That’s why the “Indian Wars” persisted. So did the British with respect to the North West Frontier. Conviction of a right to the land is a necessary component of such protracted campaigns.

The question I would ask is that, if the proponents of invading Afghanistan had stated the intention of staying and fighting there forever, would we have invaded at all? I do not think we would have and, in particular, I think that Sen. Obama would not have been bamboozled into thinking that if we just put a few more troops there the situation in Afghanistan could have been readily resolved and we would not have lost thousands of our young men and women and degraded our equipment as we have. That will result in our spending billions that would not otherwise have been spent to restore our military readiness.

I would add that, contrary to Mr. Boot’s implication, I do not believe that most American soldiers are soulless mercentaries. I think that many if not most believe that they’re defending their country and the people they love back home. I do not think they’re fighting for American empire. Good luck on your recruiting goals with that sales pitch.

California Sen. Kamala Harris is presently, apparently, backpedaling from her remarks about dumping the entire health care insurance industry, to be replaced by a single-payer system. I thought that was one of the major benefits of a single-payer system and its main source of funding. Was I wrong? She should be proud of it.

What’s the complete, unvarnished plan for reducing carbon emissions to the level you say is necessary for survival? How much of New York’s sea coast will be obscured by the offshore windmills that will be required to accomplish Gov. Cuomo’s objective of reducing carbon emissions via wind power? What’s your plan for improving the lives of the tens of millions of Americans who will never realize the benefit of higher education while bringing in tens of millions of unskilled workers to compete with them? How do you plan to raise the effective tax level on the highest income earners? Or tax their wealth?

The key point here is that the American people should be allowed to make their decisions based on information as complete as possible rather than on sugar-coated rosy scenarios. I think the people can handle the truth. It’s the politicians who can’t.