The on-again, off-again status of war with Iran seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future, as it has, more or less, for the past forty years. President Trump cancelled an air strike on Iran after it shot down a U.S. drone because he did not want to kill 150 Iranians in return for a wrecked machine. Good for him, I suppose.
I am tentative here as I do not know if the president has a solid hold on the fact that the contemporary U.S. military has no capability to fight and win a war without the use of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the fact that it has the taxpayer-funded conventional-arms capability to wreck any country or organization that attacks or credibly and imminently threatens the United States. The attack on Iran the president called off is wearyingly typical of the approach of the U.S. military – and U.S. presidents — for almost all of the decades since V-J Day, too small, too limited, and no more than a ludicrous tit-for-tat from goliath that bemuses the gnat-like enemy. This infantile war-making approach kept U.S. military forces stuck in Vietnam for decades, in Korea for 65-plus years, engaged in a quasi-war with Iran for 40 years, and in Afghanistan and Iraq for, respectively, 18 years and 16 years.
Of all of the forgoing wars, only the Afghan war was necessary, and it should and could have been wrapped up in 15-18 months via a devastatingly punitive offensive against al-Qaeda and the Afghans. The U.S. military’s tit-for-tat approach in Afghanistan — as on so many other occasions – inevitably produces nothing but a longer and more expensive war that the U.S. government finally gives up on, an action that implicitly recognizes defeat and encourages other half-pint foes to take it on.
The only mercies in war are those actions that lead to a speedy and definitive victory. On this basis, America’s road to durable peace and the effective deterrence of non-nuclear nation-states and organizations lies:
–First, in the U.S. government publicly abandoning, forever, Just War Theory, and especially its idiot tenet of proportionality. Responding to pin pricks with pin pricks invariably favors America’s enemy, which of course cannot even remotely match America’s conventional military power. This concept leads to interminable wars – see Iraq and Afghanistan – and always yields American defeats and grossly unnecessary casualties and expenses on U.S. side.
–Second, by responding with overwhelming and indiscriminate conventional force against any entity that attacks the continental United States, or can be credibly shown to pose an imminent life-and-death threat thereto, the fore-mentioned mercies can be applied. In addition, there is no room for worth-listening-to condemnation of this approach if the U.S. military is used only to respond to these two circumstances, and presidents and their generals avoid using force to remove bad-guy leaders, end a bad guy’s brutal domestic policies, or spread democracy, women’s rights, and secularism. Inflicting catastrophic defeat on an enemy best serves the defense of the United States and its genuine national interests — which are few in number and not often threatened – and would render war-making a rarely required activity for the American people.
–Third, by immediately retiring the colonels and general officers who have been sent to attend courses at Harvard at any other Ivy League school and imbibed there the madness that has given the republic multiculturalism, anti-white racism, open immigration, socialism, plans with which the Constitution and republicanism can be extinguished, and, the worst of a stinking lot, diversity. Imagine, for moment, the low quality of any mind that can believe that a policy that is meant to divide Americans against themselves is really a valuable force for producing national unity and a cohesive society. Such a mind is unfit to lead Marines and soldiers into battle.
A second category of colonels and general officers that merits immediate retirement are those who (a) can be proven to have said “there is no military solution” about any war in which they were involved and so were helping to lose it. (The latter covers all U.S. wars since 1945), and those who (b) remained silent and led their troops to be killed and maimed in wars they knew that neither the president nor his senior-most general officers intended to win.
–Fourth, by reinstalling the Founders’ controlling foreign-policy precepts. These are neutrality in other people’s wars and rivalries; non-intervention in other countries problems if they do not impact genuine U.S. interests; trade conducted through reciprocal bilateral treaties that contain no political or military commitments; maintaining proper diplomatic relations with all countries so long as the foreign regime effectively governs its territory and keeps order at home, notwithstanding its domestic policies or actions; formal congressional declarations of war, per the Constitution; and avoiding alliances that limit the republic’s independence of action and sovereignty. (NATO and the UN must be the first to go.)
The foregoing words are not meant to be bloodthirsty or brutal. They are meant only as commonsense. For Americans, wars can be very few in number because of our geographical remoteness, economic might, and abundance of resources. The seemingly endless, post-1945 steam of unnecessary wars and defeats are due, in large part, to the above-noted problems and attitudes; the ignorance of many of us of the republic’s history and its usefulness in framing policy and action; the president’s unconstitutional, so illegal, ability to make-war off his own hook; and an abject failure to define the nation’s relatively few genuine national security concerns; that is, those which, when attacked or credibly threatened, would create compelling grounds for waging a necessary war.
And, as the Roman historian Sallust wrote millennia ago, in that kind of war “only the victor gets peace in return for war.” (1)
Endnote:
–1.) Sallust. Catiline’s Conspiracy, The Jurgurthine Wars, and Histories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 65
