Ron Paul's anti-war stance makes me angry, but not at Ron Paul. What's frustrating is that, after four years under a Democratic president who campaigned against "dumb" foreign intervention, there is exactly one presidential candidate who speaks to anti-war voters. This, of course, is Paul, whose objection to getting entangled in foreign wars is pretty much of a piece with his refusal to get entangled in the modern world.
If you hate the foolish and destructive wars that have defined a decade of foreign policy, Paul is the only candidate who will tell you that those wars are mistaken and un-American. This is so even though 51% of post-9/11 veterans told the Pew Center last fall that US military adventures abroad were creating "hatred" that "leads to more terrorism." Only a third of veterans, and a little more than a quarter of the general public, said the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were worth fighting. 59% of those veterans and 58% of the public told Pew the country should be less engaged abroad and concentrate on problems at home.
The country deserves politicians who can believe this sort of thing without joining Ron Paul in embracing the gold standard and declaring the 1964 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. We used to have them. For all our history of violence, the United States used to harbor serious public reservations about war-making. When Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson urged the Allied tribunal at Nuremberg to condemn Nazi leaders, at the end of America's heroic "good war," one of his most important arguments was the need to build a system of international law that would guarantee peace. "The American dream of a peace-and-plenty economy," he urged, could never come true unless the world community outlawed aggressive war. Then the country could pursue its real greatness: to live well in peace. Otherwise we would continue to spend each generation's wealth on weapons and its courage in combat. That would not be glorious, but tragic.
Jackson, a Roosevelt Democrat -- a member, that is, of the interventionist party, and a loyalist to his late president -- wasn't just indulging the lawyer's habit of making every possible argument. The day after Pearl Harbor, when he reported feeling that the Japanese "have invited the fate of Carthage" -- total destruction -- he nonetheless urged to his son, who was of military age, to resist war fever: "The only use of war is to re-establish equilibriums which permit people to live in peace." He continued, "A people is as stupid as a man to lose its soul in gaining a world."
Jackson was speaking for a long tradition that regarded the United States as essentially a civilian nation, and war as a thing to be prevented aggressively and entered reluctantly. Most of the country's founding generation saw war-making as a vice of vainglorious kings and believed that republics like theirs would build a world of peace. It was because of their opposition to standing armies that they inserted the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" into the Constitution, as a guarantee that civilian militias would always be available. Indeed, the country did not have a meaningful peacetime army until after World War Two. The permanent military mobilization that followed prompted Dwight Eisenhower, a conservative old soldier, to warn the country against the rise of a "military-industrial complex" that threatened democracy.
Now this time-honored skepticism about war and militarism is a target for demagoguery. Whoever criticizes war must be disloyal to the troops, even if the troops want peace. Skeptics about war are irresponsible, unmanly, naïve. It's hard to think far beyond the world one knows, so it's hard to imagine that much of the military expenditure, destruction, and loss of life over the last few decades might have been unnecessary, a tragic mistake. But maybe it was.
Maybe Barack Obama thinks this too, in his midnight reveries. The political tradition he seemed to identify with before the presidency, of people's movements and community organizing, is about as non-martial as they come. His campaign was about remaking the big community at home. He never favored war in Iraq, and he must have come to doubts about Afghanistan. But, determined to give no ammunition to enemies who will call him weak and unpatriotic whatever he does, he has judged he cannot lead against war. His massively respectful attitude toward establishments works against him, too: the military has become a big, powerful American establishment, as it was not when Justice Jackson told his son that the quality of peace was the most important thing. From the moneyed defense industries and their lobbyists to national forgetfulness that things were ever any different, inertia is on the side of permanent mobilization. For the time being, doubts will not come from the White House.
This is not a call for pacifism, although that, too, is an honorable and neglected American tradition. I don't mean to disrespect the pride or the hardship of service members and their families, or downplay the prominence of war in the country's history. But we Americans need to be reminded that sometimes the greatest threat to freedom comes from leaders who would throw it away for a margin of (possibly false) security and that a harder challenge than sustaining faraway wars is building a decent life in an increasingly unequal and divided country.
War may be the hardest thing an individual endures, but for politicians, whether high-minded or hot-blooded, war is an easy path to seriousness that can obscure more serious challenges. It has been a long time since we have acted like a country that hates war and sees its most important work in peace. Since no responsible leader is telling us to stop studying war and rebuild an American dream of peace and freedom in a just society, citizens had better start demanding it.
W. Bush originally campaigned against a strategy of nation building prior to 9/11, but then his imperialist boss, Dick Cheney, wanted to take over Iraq, and we saw how that turned out.
Obama is putting our military on the exact right track which says that you don't fight unconventional wars with large conventional ground forces. Libya was the right way of going about such business--use American's super high tech advantage in conjunction with others whose interests are in line with our own.
The professor should acquaint himself with Rocky Anderson.
http://voterocky.org
Jeez, I can go on an on about your inane comment here but I'd rather save my breath and tell you to go to college and learn some history. Or at least go to topdocumentaryfilms(dot)com and view some Adam Curtis docs - "The Power of Nightmares" is a great one. Google it.
I appreciate the documentary referrals but naive as I may be I like to form my own opinions based on my own perceptions of world events. My opinions, primative as they may be, are still my opinions and not a reflection of Adam Curtis's misguided attempt to be the next Michael Moore. And yes we went to Iraq because unfortunately oil is America's heroin, but that champion of muslim peace example Suddam Hussien could have prevented it but chose not to
Again I appreciate your "trendy" comment and I'll bet they just adore you down at the coffee shop but you may better stay in the shallow end of the pool
"Jackson was speaking for a long tradition that regarded the United States as essentially a civilian nation,"
Judge Jackson was speaking in a world that bore no resemblance to the pre-War world, he just hadn't figured that out yet. Simple example: there has not been a Congressional declaration of war since he spoke. Obviously, it isn't that aggression hasn't occurred and wars haven't been fought. The world just changed.
Trying to crawl back into a pre-War hole in the ground won't work. Despite the shrunken world, we are still looking at this as Americans. We are a young nation, and we are geographically isolated. Our borders have never been invaded (well, since the British invaded and burned Washington DC). And we don't have ancient history of conflicts and reciprocal invasions. The rest of the world doesn't share that perspective.
Laws and treaties and court decisions are meaningless without an enforcement mechanism. The ideal scenario would be for NATO or the UN to enforce these agreements. They are incapable, unwilling, and incompetent to enforce anything whatsoever. And neither would continue to exist, in any case, without the US continuing to prop both of them up.
How could anybody reach this conclusion? He's very much involved in the modern world and has been exactly right in predicting the financial mess we find ourselves in. You haven't been paying attention.
Absolutely agreed! Nice post. As much as I love NPR, I sometimes am very frustrated by their lack of reporting on key issues. I listen to about 20 hours of NPR every week during my commute and NOT ONCE have I heard a discourse about "Anti-War Patriotism", as this article addresses. I keep asking myself why they'd mute that issue when it's obviously what is on everyone's mind??
A peace oriented candidate does not artificially prop up dictatorships, does not encourage growth of the military industrial complex, respects the sovereignty and choices of other people.
A peace oriented candidate does not expand bases, sanction CIA drone operations in un-authorized sovereign countries, does not utilize intelligence agencies to commit assassinations, create unrest, or conduct psyops against other countries.
A peace oriented candidate does not force democracy inorganically, does not decide for the people of a country when its best for them to revolt, does not sell arms to oligarchies to further business interests.
A peace oriented candidate is consistant when applying these views, and surrounds himself with people known to support peace rather than those who've been historic advocates for war.
My reasoning is simple, the last candidate I supported, a Nobel peace prize winner, said he was anti-war but wasn't actually anti-war, just anti the party that had started the war.
I won't be fooled again.
Don't judge Ron Paul by his opposition to the warlike invasions and occupations, let's judge him by his desire to end Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.