Yes, I agree that we have way too many armchair warriors.
My point is that I can never endorse conscription, even if it's applied uniformly (men, women, college or high school dropouts, scientists or bricklayers). It makes slaves out of men, and hides the costs of a war.
World War II _may_ have been justified, in terms of U.S. involvement on both fronts. (Arguably the Japanese were responding to U.S. interference in the Far East, interference in their very Bush-like consolidation of oil supplies for an expanding industrial economy.)
In any case, no later U.S. war or "police action" was justified. Not Korea, not Lebanon, not Grenada, not Panama, not Gulf 1, not Somalia, not Serbia (*), not Gulf 2.
* Jeez, let's just look at Serbia for a moment. Here's a region famous for giving us the term "balkanization." And a region which has been fighting with other parts of itself for several thousand years, mainly because it's a crossroads of several migration paths, a region of high mountain valleys which isolate from each other, and a zone of collision between Romans, Vandals and Germanic tribes, Mongols, Ottomans, Christers, Muslims. So, Tito dies and the patched-together Yugoslavia begins to fall apart. Faked propaganda (like the skinny men behind the barbed wire, photos rebroadcast over and over again) is spread. Does Europe, which is what Yugoslavia is part of, go in? No. So the United States fights the war and bombs Belgrade. 4000 miles away from the U.S. and Europe kicks back and watches tens of billions get spent by the U.S.
And the real hoot is that we backed the wrong side! We supported the Muslim warriors from Albania against the Western-oriented Serbs. And the Croatians, Kosovars, and others all used the ongoing war to get back at their historical enemies.
A train wreck which we should have stayed well away from.
Isolationism--political/military, not trade-wise--needs to make a comeback. This is why I hope for a train wreck, a clusterfsck. The deaths of a few thousand gullible soldiers is not something I wish, but perhaps their deaths will be useful in getting America back to the business of liberty and economic freedom and away from being the modern Roman Empire.
To make an omelette takes breaking some eggs.
--Tim May |
