Just War

Apparently the reviews of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech are in and they are pretty good, both from the right and much of the left, at least according to the Christian Science Monitor. You have got to be little suspicious when all the pundits are in agreement, like maybe you are being sold a bill of goods or are witnessing an exercise in self-delusion, especially when guys like Newt Gingrich are on your side.

I've looked over the same speech and I cannot honestly figure out what the fuss is all about. I mean, sure, it could have been worse, it could have been arrogant and self-serving, etc., although in a curious and humble way it is just that. But in truth, beyond that, and beyond the seemingly elegant rhetoric and inspiring phrases, what does it all mean? Not much, to my way of thinking.

Obama spent a lot of time talking about the ideas of a just war in his speech. I could not help but flash back to a speech I heard at the famous anti-Iraq War rally in Chicago several years ago, before he was elected Senator and where I personally first began to part company with this erstwhile hero of the left. And sure enough, this speech is filled with the same earnest lessons as the former, and they are equally irrelevant to the moral and political issues at hand.

It is always the case when people talk about a just war, they talk about World War II and they imagine they have achieved some sort of great insight in the observation that Hitler and the Axis powers could not have been thwarted without armed conflict. Conveniently forgotten or brushed away in the process is the equally valid insight that the defeat of these powers was just about the only good consequence of that war and that not recognizing this truth is a form of intellectual dishonesty of the worst sort.

The tragedy of these conflicts lies in the effect they have upon the combatants and the societies that are involved, in the very necessity of violence and the unintended consequences of the pursuit of justice or redress by violent means. It is indeed an aspect of the human condition that the greatest thinkers have grappled with since the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripedes and before, but don't kid yourself here because this speech is just lip-service. There is a difference between the idea of a just war - and what we really mean here at bottom is a necessary war - and just plain war. And if you don't get it, well, what can I say?

So after all is said and done, perhaps what one should do is follow the aphorism of Nixon: watch what we do, not what we say. And what we do, and apparently intend to keep on doing, is to maintain the largest military establishment by a geometric order than any other nation on Earth, waste untold wealth in the process, in the service of insuring our national security, which has never been actually threatened certainly since the end of the Cold War, and certainly not by the nations where we have chosen to exercise our power in the most violent and destructive ways imaginable. We also intend to intervene anywhere we feel particularly put out about another nation's policies or actions whether they can change them or not. These wars will be identified as "just" wars because we will be nice about it and we will stop torturing prisoners and so on and so on.

And we will continue to feel really good about ourselves because we have undertaken the thankless task of preserving the world's security for six decades even when the world has been too dumb to figure that out and did not especially want us to define what that security meant and did not recognize the exceptional nature of our history and mission and the happy coincidence that the security of the world precisely equaled our perceived national interest.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Plan

Thanks to Huffington Post we now have a graphic illustration of the strategic plan for Afghanistan.

So what's the problem, guys, lets get behind it and maybe we can win their hearts and minds before they realize they are dead. We're in it to win it!