Why They Call the War Power the "Stop Look and Listen" Clause--And Why We Need to Stop, Look and Listen Now
By Edwin B. Firmage ; published October 28th, 2002
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exerpt:
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PERPETUAL WAR: A CONDITION OF WAR IN THE MIND
The framers, fearful of the human capacity of perpetual war in the mind, and mindful of the human --and the monarchical-- inclination to make war perpetually and whimsically, allowed no standing army to tempt such people to use the means of violence since the army was there, seductively available to what might appear to be the quick and simple military solution to the problem at hand. Again reflecting the truly democratic nature of American government, the framers left it to Congress to create an army and a navy lest the president be inclined to misuse the potent but limited powers of the Commander-in-Chief who was, in Alexander Hamilton's phrase from the Federalist Papers, quite simply "Congress' general."
President Dwight Eisenhower sensed the awful crisis in the American soul and the American dream; and the threat to American history, when huge standing armies, with their arsenals of war serving also as engines for their own self-perpetuation, here and in other countries, would be available to a president without Congress's prior creation. His famous warning against the "military industrial complex" that might one day fuel our politics and destiny toward the threat of war and against democratic government reflected this fear.
This condition of perpetual war is now upon us. Our weaponry, and the world's, now make the consequences of the choice for war rather than peace both more likely and possibly cosmic in consequence.
The most likely cause of wars, I believe, even topping greed and ignorance, is our fear of the other. Fear, during times of war, is endemic and dreadful in consequence, as it feeds our human inclination to assume the worst in our enemy. This fear thereafter is self-fulfilling. The lethal conduct of the other that we most fear may be generated by our own fearful acts. This projection in turn fuels the fears of our enemy, continuing the "worst case" analysis of both sides.
One consequence of this potentially endless descent into fear and violence is that such fear also lessens the likelihood that simple rules of rationality can prevent such fearful descent into violence, such as the hugely helpful limitation of assumptions provided by Occam's Razor. William of Occam suggested that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon of unknown origin was, prima facie, the most likely. This rule, for me personally, has been hugely helpful in time of stress. It stops me, at least for a time, from assuming the worst motives of an adversary. It settles me down. It helps me stay sane, at least until the plot either thickens or evaporates.
Fear is both the cause and the consequence of wars of the mind: a state of war of the mind in which that violent condition, the matrix of war of the mind, never comes to rest. From 1914 until late 1989, the momentum and the fear created by World War I never came to an end. A Cold War took up where a hot war, World War II, ended, punctuated occasionally by covert wars, often more insidious and criminal because they were fought by proxy. Generations since have never really known a condition of peace in the world and peace of mind.
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and here's a decent rebuttal from the site's comment page:
Being concerned is good, but not enough
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