“…TO WAR, TO WAR, THE COUNTRY’S GOING TO WAR!”

6/12/11

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., SC), perhaps the most predictable public official, other than John McCain, who has made a habit of decrying Washington while making his living there, was on Face the Nation today. It seems he and the usual suspects, John McCain and Joe Lieberman, are pushing for military involvement in Syria. Senator Graham, who has never, ever seen a war he has not wanted the U.S. to escalate, says that “if we care about the Syrian people,” we will not rule out military action in Syria, “along the Libyan model.” Apparently, the bipartisan War Party in Washington thinks Libya is a raging success while Mr. Ghadafi (or however he is spelling his name today) remains in power, people are being slaughtered in a war designed to stop the slaughter, and we have given nary a thought to the concept of “If you break it, you buy it” as applied to geopolitics and that is proving costly beyond measure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Further, Senator Graham apparently does not read the papers; in response to criticism from outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates that they are not doing enough in Libya, or anywhere, for that matter, our European allies protest that the Libyan adventure has stretched them to the limit of their military capabilities. If Messrs. Graham, McCain, and Lieberman get their wish and we respond militarily to the plight of the Syrian people, it will be a nearly exclusive U.S. operation, with perhaps some help from Turkey and a token plane or two from one of the Gulf sheikdoms we defend in the name of democracy.

On the same broadcast, Mr. Graham makes the case for broadening the Afghan campaign to Pakistan, saying that he is tired of telling South Carolina families that their sons have been killed in Afghanistan by IEDs manufactured in Pakistan and there is nothing we can do about it. Apparently, Mr. Graham discounts that the something we can do about it is to get out of Afghanistan; getting out of a war is beyond his comprehension. If the War Hawks insist on staying in Afghanistan, perhaps they could explain why we are there. Originally, we went in to avenge the attacks of 9/11 and capture and/or kill the perpetrators. Now we seem to be on some kind of nation building exercise in a country in name only in which our strategic interests are limited, at best and that looks poised to be the graveyard of yet another empire. But I digress.

Even if we care about the Syrian people, and we do, we cannot run a foreign policy based on feelings and compassion. Foreign policy has to be run based on strategic interests. While that sounds cold, such a foreign policy in practice is far more compassionate than policy based on compassion and, in our case, a certainty that we are the only nation capable of dispensing compassion because we are the only country that knows what is good for everybody. Why? Look at the results of our compassion for the Iraqi and Afghan people. How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died so we could show out concern and care for them? Afghanistan’s numbers are smaller only because the country is less densely populated, and if Mr. Obama and the War Hawks who can only give him any credit when he is doing their jingoistic bidding continue on their Afghan “strategy,” Afghanistan will soon match Iraq in its number of victims of American compassion. A foreign policy based on strategic interests, on the other hand, would have resulted in no (0) Iraqi deaths and perhaps a handful of Afghan deaths as we quickly went in, got the bad guys, and got out.

If Messrs. Graham, Lieberman, and McCain have their way and we intervene in Syria so that they can show their compassion for the people we will be bombing and their defense contractor contributors can get even richer at your expense, we will be involved in five wars if you include the very aggressive covert operation we are conducting Yemen in support of a brutal regime that behaves very much like the Assad regime in Syria we will be fighting in the name of humanitarianism. If the War Hawks’ Pakistani dreams are realized, that will be six wars. This during a time when the country is broke (and Messrs. McCain and Graham never cease to remind us until talk turns to the military) and the American people are sick and tired of seeing their kids killed to satisfy the imperial ambitions of the xenophobes who measure their patriotism by the amount of blood and treasure they are willing to spend to foster further hatred of America overseas.