If voters are well enough informed to make the complex decision about pulling out of Iraq, why do we need liberal-socialist-progressive government to tell them how to live their daily lives?
Liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats say that the American people voted in the latest Congressional elections to pull our troops out of Iraq, sooner rather than later. Is that the whole story, and is it a valid basis for forming life-or-death foreign policy?
On the one hand, liberals are, in effect, adopting Ross Perot's idea that all voters should have computers and internet connections that would permit continuous referenda on every policy matter before Congress.
On the other hand, liberals' stock-in-trade is the firm conviction that voters need to be protected from their follies and must be coddled and comforted by government, from cradle to grave. Why does government have to keep such purportedly well-informed voters from eating the wrong things, driving the wrong automobiles, and borrowing money on terms they can't meet?
If voters are well enough informed to weigh the complex interactions among the United States, the EU, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern nations, why were Florida and Ohio voters, as Democrats claimed, unable to find polling places and unable to fathom the complexities of voting, once in the booth?
It will require a master sophist to argue that these two pictures of human nature are not contradictory.
Carried to its logical conclusion, relying entirely on public opinion-of-the-moment to decide policy issues would obviate the need for Congress altogether. It would instead necessitate polling the voters every day – should we impose higher tariffs on Chinese imports? should we attack Al Queda terrorists in Somalia? How should we react to Hugo Chavez's actions in Venezuela? Should we declare war against Mexico to stop illegals? Should we bomb Iran if the ayatollahs continue pursuit of nuclear
weapons? and so on.
If you think that voter participation is depressingly low in elections now, just wait until you see the vanishingly low participation rates in such direct voting every day on all policy issues. Liberals would be compelled to revert to current reliance upon public opinion polls, which are based on sampling, at most, about 2 out of every 100,000 voters (which amounts to less than three-thousandths of one percent of voter rolls).
But not to worry. We know that opinion polls, formed by media hype, are always accurate assessors and predictors, as demonstrated by the BCS bowl game between No. 1-ranked Ohio State and Florida.
As noted earlier in "Iraq Policy and Public Opinion:"
The underlying assumption is that public opinion, expressed in elections or opinion polls, in all cases represents truth and wisdom. Such is seldom the case when complex policy matters are the subject of those opinions.
This is a seriously important point. We are too stupid to decide if we want to smoke or not, but we are intelligent enough to decide the fate of a foreign nation… great point…
It seems this author just won’t accept that wars are about emotion, both the intense emotions on the battlefield and the less intense but politically more dangerous emotions on the home front. We went into Iraq to avenge 9/11, just as we had gone into Afghanistan to avenge 9/11. Even though we can’t publicly admit or debate it, revenge as an emotion is sweet and often necessary to maintain political stability. The public’s emotions have a shelf life though, spanning different periods depending on the issue. But when the shelf life expires, the public wonders what we were all fired up about and wants to focus on other things – that’s basically what happened in Iraq. With Afghanistan, the war was over well before the shelf life had expired and we were left with that unsatisfied feeling – like a weight watchers meal when you’re really hungry.
Americans have a talent for rationalizing their emotions into “it just seems obvious” or “the logic is inescapable” type arguments. However, if you stand far back to witness the parade of history, the contradictions are the most obvious and the contradictions point to the conclusion that we just plain like to fight. Our obsessive focus on ideology is one indicator. 60 years ago we fought the fascist beast with the communists as our ally. Then we fought the communist beast, both cold and hot wars, with the former fascist beasts as our allies. Now, we are fighting the so-called “Islamic” beast with both the former fascist and communist beasts as our allies, or at least as our sympathetic coat holders.
Sometimes the emotion of self-preservation wins out over our need to fight. We fought the communist beasts, but not the Great Satan of communist bestiality, the Soviet Union. In 1945, we looked at the board and found the Russians with 280 battle hardened combat divisions to our 80 divisions, both American and British Commonwealth forces combined. The Russians had born the brunt of the European war and defeated the best armed forces in the world. They had better tanks, more men, more artillery and their industry was dispersed to the point where our strategic bombing wasn’t a war winner. We looked at the board and said “no thanks’; we could lose or be forced into a costly stalemate. For the next 40 years, nothing changed our minds and the Cold War stayed cold. The “irrefutable” logic of opposing evil ideologies was sound, but not when we could get our behinds kicked all over the map.
In characterizing General George Patton, Omar Bradley explained Patton’s philosophy as seeing war as a normal and ancient condition of all mankind; it was inevitable from his viewpoint and he concluded that for all human beings war was as natural as sex. Isolationism as a guiding philosophy is one of those attempts to tame our emotions and keep our heads cool and our perspective in balance. But, like many guidelines, we tend to slip into rationalizations; in this case about how evil the other guy is and how “logical” it would be to punch him out. Fighting to defend yourself and your family makes sense, but defending your country can get very complicated, very quickly.
Iraq wasn’t about 9/11. And it’s absolutely ridiculous to say that we can’t discuss it in the public forum, because people have been doing that ever since we went in. While a great many people cry out “Bush lied, and told us it was about 9/11″…it just ain’t so. He said that “after 9/11 we couldn’t let a threat become imminent again to where it could attack us and our allies.” Yes, he said 9/11, but he didn’t say that this was about 9/11. This isn’t hard to understand, and you really have to ignore what was said to come to your conclusion. What Iraq was about finishing a decade old conflict in which our enemy defied the terms of the ceasefire by shooting at our planes everyday and denying the U.N. access to weapons depots. You can ramble on about whatever you want, but this was what the war was about: deposing a dictator who refused to comply with the peace treaty, and who was trying to make WMDs again. It wasn’t about 9/11, or emotions, or when your dog died as a child. Your theory is just wrong. But that’s cool, it happens to the best of us.
Ah the parade of history. While you find our behavior contradictory and just can’t grasp it…it’s quite simple. The fascist beasts were the greatest threat to the world at large. So, we took on the greatest threat to the world’s survival and accepted anyone’s help that offered. At the time, America was also much more socialist than it is now…and dear FDR was great friends with Uncle Joe. After Hitler and the Fascists fell, the country was no longer fascist and therefore, no longer our enemy. So their help in destroying the next biggest threat to our existance was welcomed. And why wouldn’t it be? “Your daddy and my daddy were enemies…so even though they’re both dead, you’re my enemy too.” Quite foolish.
But today, the ex-Commies and ex-Fascists are not our allies but anchors around our necks as we’re trying to swim. Germany blocks needed resolutions in the U.N. as does Russia. And Russia has been providing aid and technology to Iran. To characterize Russia as either our ally or our “coat holder” is naive.
And who runs into a battle they know they’ll lose. That’s moronic. You pick and choose the battles you can win. Purposefully choosing to fight a fight you can’t win is idiotic, and doesn’t help anyone. However, this is not to say we did “nothing” throughout the Cold War. There was plenty of action against the spread of communism, just no dragged out wars with China or the U.S.S.R.
Isolationism is a foolish vision. It wasn’t possible during WW2, and it certainly isn’t possible today. It has nothing to do with “cooling our emotions” and everything to do with being too lazy or morally bankrupt to deal with problems that will eventually be at our door step. 9/11 was the result of such foolish short mindedness.
Of course war is complicated. Peace is complicated. Diplomacy is complicated. Hey, there’s nothing on a world wide scale that’s simple. When we look at complexity however, what we need to ask ourselves is: “Do we want the complexity of figuring our how to kill the enemy? Or do we want the complexity of figuring out how to dig out the bodies of our citizens for burial?” It’s not a terribly tough choice.
“Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time, a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help (subsidium) to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.”
On Subsidiarity – Pius XI