Joel Mathis

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 Unite

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

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

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 tru

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.

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, nec

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 ap

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.

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 justifi