Yesterday was Memorial Day. Here in Washington, the National Mall was packed with Americans paying their respects. The motorcycles of Rolling Thunder echoed through the streets. Sunday night featured a concert in front of the Capitol. At dinner parties, everyone was talking about the President's new National Security Strategy. And today, I received a note -- the fifth one in two weeks -- from a friend leaving for Afghanistan.
I look at the masses on the Mall and I look at my friends. I wonder how much they know about each other. And I worry.
We've got about a year now -- in Afghanistan -- to achieve some kind of measurable progress. The stakes are rising. Congress will soon be voting on a supplemental funding bill for the war and just passed a record breaking $726 billion dollar defense authorization. And, whether you agree with troop withdrawal timelines or not, Senator Russ Feingold's amendment reflects a thoughtful expression from Capitol Hill: We support a long-term commitment to Afghanistan, just not with military troops. It received 18 votes. Representative James McGovern has a companion bill coming up in the House.
Two of my friends going over will be in uniform -- but all 5 of them will be helping Afghans establish self-governance. Monitoring the criminal justice system, setting up communications infrastructure, teaching. In the policy world, these sorts of activities are lumped under "peacebuilding." The US rationale for being in Afghanistan gets more complex by the day: It seems fair to say that most of the warfighting has become peacebuilding.
Having taught Peace studies in California and West Point cadets, I'm not surprised. Strategies that acknowledge basic human behavior are a core lesson, and much of the subject matter is about preventing violence and managing conflicts peacefully. These are vital lessons for global security today. Simply put, security is about people.
British General Rupert Smith put it well when he described today's wars:
All the people, anywhere -- are the battlefield. Military engagements can take place anywhere in the presence of civilians, against civilians, in defence of civilians. Civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as an opposing force.So I wonder, do the crowds on the Mall looking at the World War II memorial understand how vastly different today's world is? That in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we've finally figured out that power is not equivalent to force but, instead, that our strength is found in the ability to influence change? The President's new National Security Strategy brims with this soaring vision. But do we Americans get it? Are we ready to craft a new plot about where we're going in the world and how we'll get there? Most importantly, do we understand that this change can't be led by those in uniform or at the end of a gun? The military itself keeps telling us this.
The President's strategy is a welcome rhetorical change. Now we must put some legs underneath it. Much of the non-military security infrastructure should already exist. Yet Instead of running toward the future in 1991, American civilian leaders looked backward and continually threw the military at problems. Those in uniform have since become a domestic and international 911 service. In the 90's we had Somalia and the Balkans, but more recently uniformed public servants have been tasked with rebuilding Iraq, rebuilding Afghanistan, Haiti relief logistics, and the New Orleans rescue. There have even been calls to send in the military to fight crime at the Mexican border and plug the BP oil disaster. Each of these crises deserves a response, but when does it end? Congress and the Executive Branch started bolstering non-military capabilities five years ago, under George Bush. Elected leaders know this is not a partisan problem.
However, the problem for all of us, as Americans in a democracy, is that we live in a country where popular buy-in to the notion that citizens and their civilian elected leaders are the primary authorities on all policymaking, is vital to sustain the system. That civilian supremacy in setting strategy is the cornerstone of our success and credibility in the world.
Our failure to achieve this balance is manifesting all over the place right now, in Afghanistan in particular. We keep telling everybody else to do things that we no longer are able to do ourselves.
Tea partiers and residents of the Gulf Coast take note: could it be that we've so scorned and dismantled our government that the only loved and well-functioning institution left is the military? Americans love it for a reason, and I agree with them. It is the only place where unabashed service to a collective outcome is allowed anymore.
We need a national conversation about this imbalance. Because the more we add to the notion that the people who have the most to say, the most authority on national security, the superior opinions, are wearing or have worn a uniform, the more we go down a murky, and unhelpful path. One way to shift this perception next Memorial Day would be to give thanks to all those who have risked themselves or died for our country -- with uniform and without.
Its not too late today, even.
Follow Lorelei Kelly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/loreleikelly
And Obama's staff is contributing to the well functioning NASA in Florida's demise, and doing so as badly or worse as Bush:
KSC Workforce Grant Announcement - June 2
http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=21843.0
The military is trusted precisely because it is able to GET THINGS DONE and although it makes its share of mistakes, they make these mistakes in the process of trying to accomplish its mission.
The politicians, for better or worse, define the mission and the military tries to move heaven and earth to get it done.
As concerns Afghanistan.. we part company here. We need to get out of there ASAP. It is not a country bound by a constitution and the rule of law, or even by a consensus government. It's fuedal, and tribal nature make it impossible to for us to leave behind any kind of legacy of democracy and western values. One step forward and two backward.. that is all you get.
military military military.
you gave your bias away with your former teaching of the military.
we are an imperialist nation and like all imperialist nations present and past we honor our soldiers more than any other aspect of our society.
these wars for profits have nothing to do with our personal freedoms.
these are wars for profits sold to the americans people as being wars for our personal freedoms.
and most americans like the germans and japanese of years ago buy that crock lock stock and barrel.
it starts with our young the brainwashing.
the only thing that will stop this imperialist nation is a complete meltdown of its economic system which appears to be occuring now.
the world will be safer for our meltdown.
take your next family vacation to iraq and see how our imperialism has worked on that nation where our puppet iraq gov is locked up in the green zone for their own protection from their own people.
kind of like the puppet gov we intstalled in nam.
What are you talking about, 'dismantled'? The government has been expanded every single year. Spending on domestic programs and agencies grows every year.
Let us put down the burden of empire. Close the hundreds of military bases around the world, bring our soldiers home, and maintain a military only large enough to protect our shores. Let other nations be responsible for their own security.
being a conservative, I can spot you guys a mile away. I love you guys but wish you could be less ideological and more pragmatic. Rand Paul notwithstanding, the country is so far to the Left now, your views, which, at one time might have caught on, will only be ridiculed!
In any event, as a Reagan conservative, we have more in common with eachother than we do with the socialists and communists who populate this blog.
Wonder why the wars have been going on for so long? War is a big money maker for the military industry and for banks. All the money for the wars has to be borrowed with interest from the private banks of the federal reserve.
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“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” George Orwell
R/ PRONESE
Sometimes the mere existence of a good military serves as deterrence for attack, sometimes it takes destroying all an enemy's forces and supplies, but the end goal is not that destruction.
Better?
R/ PRONESE
Remember the Marshall Plan?
We have not seen anything like that commitment to a plan to stabilize a country, but rather the predatory approach typified by the Shock Doctrine, which has been widely resented, ineffective, and has raised levels of cynicism and mistrust to the point where real stabilization is much more difficult when it is actually tried.
2 out of 100 people in the military is a "Frank Burns"
96 out of 100 people in the rest of the government are "Frank Burns"
THAT, Lorelei Kelly, is why most of us love our Military Men and Women and feel disdain and disgust about much of the rest of our self-serving government.
Our Constitutional Republic has held together precisely because we have honored the Constitution even in the face of attempts to destroy the Constitution. The Constitution is really a framework for good government interactions and we ignore it at our peril. Also, if you actually read the entire Declaration of Independence, you will see many of the same problems we have today. Secularists try to focus on economic concerns as the basis for the revolutionary war, but there were really a lot of others that in the order of precedence were more important than economic concerns. One final note, the colonies were actually more prosperous than Great Britain with the average standard of living something like 20% better.
This statement has absolutely no basis in fact. Tax rates on top earners are lower than in the 50s. The amount of wealth held by the top 1% versus everyone else is higher than since before the Great Depression. Jobs have gone oversees because other nations are less developed and have a weaker currency and lower standard of living and are therefore CHEAPER places to run a factory. I guess you think then we should have a standard of living equal to the poorer parts of India then so we can compete? Is that your definition of a "successful nation?"
Where do you get your ideas, other than from some nebulous intuition that things must be a certain way because you really, really want to make fun of liberals because they are so academic and smarty pants? Or is it because you've committed yourself to a particular ideology and you will deny you are wrong about it until the very end because admitting you are wrong would be too stinging to the ego?
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.