Joel Mathis

 Stephen Wertheim speaks the truth :  This is true about domestic priorities as well. I think it's weird, for example, that there is so much talk about having the military distribute a coronavirus vaccine. A country as prosperous as the United States has been should have a robust enough public health system to do that job, shouldn't it?

 Jeet Heer with an excellent observation : My worry is that: Because of his attempts to portray himself as something of a dove -- even though that's arguable at best -- Trump will make it more difficult in mainstream politics to challenge Washington's hawkish consensus. The president's foreign policy incompetence and general terribleness will mean that if there is another leader who legitimately shrinks from using the hammer of the U.S. military to treat all challenges as a nail, they'll be tarred by association with Trump's rhetoric. Maybe that's too hopeful, actually. It's difficult to position yourself for president in this country without buying into that hawkish consensus. The peaceniks are forever at a disadvantage.

 Daniel Larison: Andrew Bacevich recently commented on our government’s senseless policy in Syria: “So instead of a realistic policy defined by clear national interests, the United States drifts toward a confrontation with Russia in a place that virtually no American believes is worth dying for.” This “drift” is what happens when U.S. foreign policy operates as if on autopilot. Instead of deploying troops somewhere to achieve a specific end to advance an American interest, our policymakers come to see the deployments as ends in themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the deployment serves a clear purpose or whether it is a wise use of resources. It evidently doesn’t matter whether it’s legal. Once the U.S. sends troops somewhere, it usually takes extraordinary effort to extract them later, and that has no effect on subsequent decisions to deploy them in new countries. Correct. I'd add that deploying to countries like Syria creates a moral element to this flytrap effect: Once

Something I've been wrestling with since I posted my opposition to the Uganda intervention is whether I could ever support an American military intervention on purely humanitarian grounds. I came of political age around the time of the Rwandan genocide, and I can say that it truly troubled my conscience at the time—and angered me greatly that the West stood by and watched while an entire region descended into hell. If my framework for supporting a military intervention wouldn't allow the United States to get involved, then two possibilities exist: The United States should never intervene on humanitarian grounds, or the framework doesn't work. Spencer Ackerman today gets at the trouble inherent with humanitarian interventions conducted under a doctrine known as "Responsibility To Protect" on his blog today: The uncomfortable truth is that a belief in human rights is a disruptive force in global affairs. It scrambles ideological boundaries and takes people down

Ooh. Self-referential headlines are ugly, aren't they? But back when President Obama announced the United States would intervene in Libya's civil war, I set out a list of questions to help guide me through decisions on supporting or not supporting America's military interventions abroad. Now that Qaddafi is dead , it's a good time to apply those questions to America's latest intervention— the sending of 100 troops to Central Africa to aid the fight against the brutal Lord's Resistance Army. Here are the questions, slightly revised: A: Does the party against whom the United States is considering military action threaten U.S. security? No. The Lord's Resistance Army isn't attacking the United States or United States' interests. Now that the U.S. is getting involved, though, maybe that changes. B: Is the party against whom the United States is considering action committing genocidal-levels of violence, such that even by the standards of war or c

I'm trying to imagine what the world would look like if Andrew Bacevich ran the United States. Every couple of years, Bacevich -- a retired Army colonel who is now a history professor at Boston U -- releases a new book that goes something like this: America is overextended and entirely too militarized. We need to live within our means, bring the troops home and start practicing a citizenship where all of us (and not just the one-half of one percent of us) serve as citizen soldiers, devoted to the common defense of our nation instead of power projection around the world. " Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War " is another one of these books; Bacevich is a bit of a one-note Johnny -- but it's an interesting, angry, erudite note, and so I keep returning to him. Instead of rooting him on, though, it might be good to ponder how things change if anybody in power took Bacevich's views seriously. So what does the world look like if America took Bace