Does this count against Donald Trump breaking America's "39-year streak" of new wars?

We refuse to spend enough money to make sure that unemployed people can eat and pay rent, but we can talk about spending tens of billions of dollars to create a fleet of deadly robot submarines. President Trump doesn't get to claim to be the peace president when he's spending so much money trying to make the United States a more lethal nation. We're already pretty lethal!

Anyway, POTUS and his cronies have been speaking lately that he stopped America's 39-year streak of starting new wars. To my way of thinking, this counts against that:

The U.S. military’s Africa Command is pressing for new authorities to carry out armed drone strikes targeting Qaeda-linked Shabab fighters in portions of eastern Kenya, potentially expanding the war zone across the border from their sanctuaries in Somalia, according to four American officials.

The new authorities, which must still be approved by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and then President Trump, do not necessarily mean the United States will start carrying out drone attacks in Kenya. Nevertheless, they would give Africa Command permission under certain circumstances to expand the counterterrorism drone war into another country.

Arguably, this is an old war expanding to a new arena. If Trump gets to keep his streak-breaking claim, though, it won't be because he's not expanding the United States' wars.

Movie Night: PATHS OF GLORY

Three thoughts about PATHS OF GLORY, coming up with spoilers...

* This is one of my favorite movies, about the awful absurdities of war and the deadly, inexorable illogic that results when scandalous "patriotism" and amoral careerism meet each other. Men who sit in gilded palaces order an impossible attack -- they know it from the beginning -- and then judge the troops who fail to succeed in that attack as cowards. Kirk Douglas is the hero here, but even he agrees to carry out the attack knowing it almost certainly won't succeed, rather than let somebody else take charge of his regiment. Three men are chosen to stand trial for cowardice -- as stand-ins for the entire regiment that failed -- and sentenced to death. The system is so relentless that even those who see the terrible, Kafka-esque qualities of it -- or those who should, like the regimental priest -- go along with it anyway. There are constant exhortations to courage from men who show none to men who have already demonstrated it -- but it is the latter group that suffers.

The movie is based on a true story.

* PATHS OF GLORY was made in 1957, and while it would still be subversive today, it's amazingly so for an era of Cold War-influenced filmmaking of movies like THE CAINE MUTINY and FORT APACHE whose ultimate messages were: "Sure, your leaders may be nuts and misguided, but you owe it to them to support them and carry out their orders anyway." Indeed, Wikipedia tells me the film wasn't shown in Francisco-era Spain until 1986, nor in Switzerland until 1970. In the US, it was banned at all military bases. On that basis alone, this is worth watching.

* It's also worth watching, not just for its themes, but for the performance by Kirk Douglas, a lion of a star at his absolute peak. Nobody did righteous fury like Douglas. It is something to behold.

The Taliban are using our technology. Because of course they are.

The American war in Syria may end soon. When did it start?

War in North Korea is not inevitable - no matter what the hawks say

Speaking of the way Americans are sold wars of choice as no choice at all:

While the Kim regime is technically a Communist government, the ideology that governs North Korea is known as “Juche” (or, more technically, “neojuche revivalism”). The official state ideology is a mixture of Marxism and ultra-nationalism. Juche is dangerous because it is infused with the historical Korean concept of “songun,” or “military-first,” and it channels all state resources into the North Korean military—specifically its nuclear program. Juche is not a self-defensive ideology. Rather, it is a militaristic and offensive belief system. If the North gets a fully functional nuclear arsenal, they will use those weapons to strike at their American, South Korean, and Japanese enemies.

Get that: If North Korea gets the right combination of nukes and missiles, it will definitely attack the United States. Which leads to the inevitable conclusion: "Given these facts, why should we waste precious time on negotiations that will only empower the North and weaken the rest of us? We should be preparing for conflict on the peninsula, not begging the North to take more handouts from us as they build better nuclear weapons."

But there's plenty of reason not to believe that North Korea will automatically strike the United States if it's capable.

Here's why. If North Korea launched nukes at America, America would launch its nukes at North Korea. Everybody knows this. The North Koreans know this. This is not in doubt. It is difficult to establish one's dominance over a continental peninsula if you, along with the peninsula, are smoking, radioactive ash.

As NBC News reports: "The country says it wants a nuclear bomb because it saw what happened when Iraq and Libya surrendered their weapons of mass destruction: their regimes were toppled by Western-backed interventions. It wants to stop others, namely the administration of President Donald Trump, from toppling its totalitarian regime."

The North Korean regime is awful. But that penchant for self-preservation means it's unlikely to start a war that will end with its destruction. Understand, there's a long history of this. America's hawks warned that Iran's mullahs had a messianic ideology that would cause them to lash out with nuclear weapons once they were capable; we invaded Iraq because we didn't want Saddam Hussein to prove he had weapons "in the form of a mushroom cloud."

The essential idea is always that nations unfriendly to the United States are so irrational, care so little for their own survival, that they're willing to commit civilizational suicide via a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies. But it hasn't happened yet.

So when hawks make that case for war, make them prove it. Point out that history hasn't worked out that way so far. Point out that we've invaded a country to no good end because of similar thought processes. But never merely accept that we have to choose war. It's not inevitable, no matter how much hawks sell it as such.

Cross-posted at SixOh6.

Self-restraint in North Korea

This has been stuck in my craw for the last day or so.

The unusually blunt warning, from Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, the commander of American troops based in Seoul, came as South Korea’s defense minister indicated that the North’s missile, Hwasong-14, had the potential to reach Hawaii. 

“Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” General Brooks said, referring to the 1953 cease-fire that halted but never officially ended the Korean War. “As this alliance missile live-fire shows, we are able to change our choice when so ordered by our alliance national leaders. 

“It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”

You know what else is a choice? Making war.

There's something awful and dangerous about the idea that war is a default position, that it takes an act of will not to send thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen into combat to inflict death on a widespread scale.

 This is particularly true in North Korea, where it seems likely the regime is developing nuclear weapons as a means of protecting itself from interference from superpowers like the United States. The likelihood they'll actually start a war? Pretty low.

Which means we'd be starting a war for the purpose of ... making sure they can't retaliate if we decide to go to war with them. That seems like a terrible squandering of life in order to prevent an unlikely outcome.

 Listen, the North Korean regime is — as George W. Bush once said — loathsome. But if our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved this century, going to war against loathsome regimes doesn't necessarily result in a net improvement.

 But their provocations do not require an armed response. Anybody who tells you differently might have an itchy trigger finger.

Winning wars is OK. Waging wars is better.

At The National Interest, John Mueller suggests that Obama won't get much electoral lift from winning the Libya war—we're still talking about that?—because presidents rarely do:

Nobody gave much credit to Bush for his earlier successful intervention in Panama, to Dwight Eisenhower for a successful venture into Lebanon in 1958, to Lyndon Johnson for success in the Dominican Republic in 1965, to Jimmy Carter for husbanding an important Middle East treaty in 1979, to Ronald Reagan for a successful invasion of Grenada in 1983, or to Bill Clinton for sending troops to help resolve the Bosnia problem in 1995. Although it is often held that the successful Falklands War of 1982 helped British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the elections of 1983, any favorable effect is confounded by the fact that the economy was improving impressively at the same time.

Right: Americans expect to win wars, so you don't really get special consideration as president for getting the job done. There's really only two war-related situations that seem to make much of a difference to a president's standing:

• Losing wars is bad. Think LBJ, of course, but even the relative success of the surge in Iraq wasn't enough to overcome Americans' (entirely correct) belief that George W. Bush had mostly prosecuted the war very badly. That led to Democrats' electoral success in 2006 and 2008.

• Going to war, on the other hand, is tremendously good in the short-term. George HW Bush saw his tepid popularity skyrocket when he led the U.N. coalition against Saddam in 1991; his son saw a similar boost after 9/11. A lot of that depends on the perceived justness of the cause; Obama didn't get a boost, most likely, because A) Americans barely cared about the war there, B) American military involvement was mostly kept out-of-sight, and C) his administration didn't do much in terms of rallying around the flag.

And a president has to show himself to be willing to go to war. Every president is scared of looking weak, and certainly political opponents are always willing to scream "appeasement" if a rival country gains an inch anywhere else in the world.

The lesson? Be willing to go to war. Make sure you win it. Losing is really the only part of the equation that is for ... losers.

On the value of peacemakers

Though I'm not ethnically Mennonite, and though I'm lapsed, I was tribalistically pleased this morning to discover that one of this year's recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Leymah Gbowee, is a grad of Eastern Mennonite University. And the announcement took me all the way back to August, when discussion heated up about another Mennonite college—Goshen—and its decision not to play the "Star Spangled Banner" before games, citing its warlike nature.

Reasonable people can disagree on that topic, I think, but all too often the negative reaction was simply smug:

NBC Sports' Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: "I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket."

That quote has stuck in my craw for two months now. But what Chandler—what a lot of people—don't understand is that Mennonite pacifism isn't about "fleeing" conflict, necessarily, but bringing nonviolent tools to act of resolving injustice and conflict. It's a belief that you don't have to shoot your way out of every bad situation or bomb every evil person—that, in fact, doing so can make injustices and conflicts worse. I was once a pure pacifist; I'm not anymore, but I still think there's a great deal of wisdom to be found in that approach.

And Gbowee exemplifies that approach. Here's the relevant portion of her Wikipedia biography:

In 2002, Leymah Gbowee was a social worker who organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. The peace movement started with local women praying and singing in a fish market.[6] She organized the Christian and Muslim women of Monrovia, Liberia to pray for peace and to hold nonviolence protests.

Under Leymah Gbowee's leadership, the women managed to force a meeting with President Charles Taylor and extract a promise from him to attend peace talks in Ghana.[7] Gbowee then led a delegation of Liberian women to Ghana to continue to apply pressure on the warring factions during the peace process.[8] They staged a silent protest outside the Presidential Palace, Accra, bringing about an agreement during the stalled peace talks.

Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman, presidents of two different Lutheran churches, organized the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), and issued a statement of intent to the President: "In the past we were silent, but after being killed, raped, dehumanized, and infected with diseases, and watching our children and families destroyed, war has taught us that the future lies in saying NO to violence and YES to peace! We will not relent until peace prevails."[9]

Their movement brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003 and led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president,

Lest I take too much Mennonite pride in this: All this occurred before Gbowee's time at EMU. But it's not an accident that a Mennonite university is where she decided to further her studies into the approach she was already taking.

And contra Rick Chandler and his ilk, it was Gbowee's nonviolent—but active—approach that helped end a civil war in Liberia. I don't know that pacifism is always the answer to the world's problems, but I do know that violence isn't—and that it's often used when a nonviolent approach might produce better results. Gbowee didn't flee: She confronted a problem. She just didn't use weapons to do it.

So, thank God for Leymah Gbowee. And thank God for the peacemakers. We could use a few more of them.

Commentary's continuing lack of self-awareness

Max Boot hasn't done me the favor of sounding like Paul Krugman for a couple of days, but lucky for me his Commentary colleague Ted Bromund is stepping up to the plate:

The Economist reports two researchers from Columbia and Cornell have been studying the personalities of individuals who, in surveys, express a willingness to personally kill one human in the hope of saving more. Their conclusion is there is “a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas . . . and personalities that were psychopathic.” TheEconomist’s conclusion, in its usual slightly tongue-in-cheek style, is utilitarianism is a “plausible framework” for producing legislation, and the best legislators are therefore psychopathic misanthropes.

 This would seem to be an indictment of governance generally—there's always a weighing of costs and benefits in decision-making, or there should be—but for Bromund it's an indictment of progressive governance. He writes: "But the problem with applying utilitarianism to legislation ... is someone has to decide which ends serve the greater good, just as the Ivy League experiments require someone to decide who lives and who dies, and just as top-down legislation in the progressive tradition requires wisdom that no single person possesses."

But to me, this psychopathic framework reminds me strongly of the decision to start a pre-emptive war. Like, say, accusing a country of possessing weapons of mass destruction and then invading or bombing that country to prevent the—entirely hypothetical—use of those weapons. In that case, a country's leaders are willing to see hundreds or thousands of people die so that many more people might be spared a horrible death. At least, I think that's the logic.

Is that psychopathic? By the standards advanced here, I'd say it is. And yet Bromund's colleagues at Commentary can reliably be counted on to cheerlead any proposed U.S. military intervention, anywhere, for nearly any reason. Our debacle in Iraq has suggested that Bromund is correct: Our leaders aren't really wise enough to balance decisions of life and death very well. Yet his magazine would almost always give our government carte blanche to make those decisions in the military arena. EPA regulations are pretty small potatoes compared to that.

Who knew there was an Afghan warlord named Milo Minderbinder?

Washington Post:

The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional investigators.

It's really not a good day for Afghan war supporters.

Army Major Nathan Hoepner is an American hero

Perusing a recent issue of Military Review, I came across this (PDF) article about a debate (and the results of that debate) among U.S. soldiers working the "Sunni triangle" of Iraq in 2003. Some wanted "the gloves to come off" and to start hitting, beating and otherwise torturing suspected insurgents. But Maj. Nathan Hoepner opposed such efforts, and wrote in support of his position:

As for “the gloves need to come off” . . . we
need to take a deep breath and remember
who we are . . . Those gloves are . . . based on
clearly established standards of international
law to which we are signatories and in part
the originators . . . something we cannot just
put aside when we find it inconvenient . . .
We have taken casualties in every war we
have ever fought—that is part of the very
nature of war. We also inflict casualties,
generally many more than we take. That in
no way justifies letting go of our standards.
We have NEVER considered our enemies
justified in doing such things to us. Casualties
are part of war—if you cannot take
casualties then you cannot engage in war.
Period. BOTTOM LINE: We are American
Soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying
on the high ground. We need to stay there.

Heroes are men and women who can keep their heads about them to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. Maj. Hoepner -- today he is a lieutenant colonel -- is clearly such a man.