‘The Tide of War’
“The tide of war is receding,” or so President Obama keeps saying. He said it on June 22, 2011, talking about Afghanistan. He said it on Sept. 21, 2011, in his address to the annual opening of the UN General Assembly. He said it on Nov. 11, 2011, at Arlington Cemetery. He said it on Jan. 5, 2012, while announcing cuts in the U.S. military.
And on Tuesday night, in his State of the Union address, there it was again. Though this time Obama presented it less as an announcement than as the established context for his further remarks: “As the tide of war recedes… .”
If saying could make it so, this would all be a marvelous exercise. But there’s a dangerous muddle here, in which the gutting of U.S. defense and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from overseas theaters are confused with an end to war. If the metaphor here is to be one of ocean tides, then the extension of the metaphor is that we are being invited to spread out our well-padded entitlement programs and picnic on the beach — oblivious to the signs that the water is coming back. North Korea and Iran are still working on nuclear bombs and missiles. Iran, along with its ties to al Qaeda, continues to arm and support terrorist groups such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, which in turn have networks well beyond the Middle East, including in Latin America — where Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad just completed yet another visit to his pals in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. China is busy with a massive military buildup. Russia is sending arms to Syria. And, with the U.S. nodding along, Egypt is on its way to Islamist rule. These are not developments that herald an imminent era of peace. Neither is the plot alleged by Obama’s own Justice Department, in which Iran’s Quds Force planned to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant, just last fall — sometime between Obama’s first two iterations about the receding tide of war, and the last three.
There’s something else that’s troubling about this “receding tide” formulation. Like that long and bending “arc of history” which Obama invoked while passively bearing “witness” in 2009 to the slaughter of Iranian protesters, this “tide” business implies that while the little folk might fret about the growing threats, the president walks hand in hand with some grand force of history which, catalyzed by his presence, will somehow sort it all out. It’s of a piece with Obama’s declaration when he became his party’s candidate in 2008 that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” In that same speech, he went on to say, “this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation … .” Whatever the talk of arcs and tides, America has enemies focused on the here and now. Are we really more secure?
Again with this misnomer of “gutting” the military. The military is still being allotted more money next year than it was last year. Just not as much as it was promised. Somehow that just doesn’t seem like “gutting” to me. Conservatives need to stop making exscuses for military waste and fiscal malfeasance just because they are the military. Lets also not forget that the cost of the wars we are engaged in is not part of the defense budget, but falls under discretionary spending. Its pathetic to me to watch conservatives bloviate about defense spending using the same washington math that progs use to fight tooth and nail against any cuts to entitlements spending. Defense spending is not sacrosanct, and the military needs to learn to allot its funds more prudently. Honestly the military is incredibly wasteful, and now rather than adjust fire and try to make better use of the money they have, the military commands first response is to cut personell. The fact is that SM’s cost way less to maintain than all of the over paid lazy, worthless DOD civilians and contractors doing jobs that a well trained SM would do better, but I doubt a whole lot of them will be losing their jobs.
The tide of war is always receding with Obama and it always will, when you want to withdraw from the world and reduce the size of your military. Why spend money on a military when there are so very many far-left social-wlfare programs right here in America that can be funded? This may sound wierd, but in a way Obama and Ron Paul have a lot in common when it comes to foreign policy. They are both isolationists, they both want to do nothing about major dictatorships like Iran, and they both think that we can exist without a strong military. Franklin Roosevelt believed the same thing, just before 7 December 1941.
“Exist without a strong military”? Seriously, you can blame Obama for much but gutting the military isnt one of them. Some US contractors needs to be taught the word accountability, and cost-efficiency. Any serious engineer will look at bundles like the F-35 and just see this huge mass of paperpushers coalescing around maybe 35-40 proper engineers + their crews.
And oh, war with Iran. Is it really worth it to destroy the capitalist system for postponing their nuclear weapon with , charitably, 12 years? Oilprices above 200 would be really cool, huh?
Fnord, you said, “Is it really worth it to destroy the capitalist system for postponing their nuclear weapon with , charitably, 12 years? Oilprices above 200 would be really cool, huh?”
Who said anything about war with Iran? I said Obama is doing nothing about Iran and it’s true. There are a million ways to overthrow the mullahs in that country and Obama isn’t doing any one of them. The best chance we had of overthrowing the regime came in 2009 when the Iranians had their “elections.” The people were inches away from overthrowing the mullahs and Obama was too stupid to take advantage of the situation. And it was a domestic uprising that had nothing to do with us. All we needed to do was tell the protesters that we were standing by them and give them whatever assistance THEY needed to overthrow the regime. But Obama kept his mouth shut and the mullahs stayed in power. It was a huge blunder and would have given Iran a real chance at some form of democracy had it gone through. THAT is how you win in Iran, by overthrowing the regime, NOT by invading or bombing anybody. Had Obama taken the opportunity that was handed to him on a plate, Iran could have fallen almost as fast as Egypt did. But people like Obama and Ron Paul simply think it’s none of our business, so now we have a bunch of maniacs Iran about to get a nuclear weapon. Good job.
Oh, and as for your claim of $200 oil prices, well, if we were DRILLING off our own coasts, encouraging more pipelines like the one Obama is stopping from Canada, and encouraged the use of natural gas and clean coal (things we have a lot of), we wouldn’t NEED anything from the Persian Gulf.
As for our military, sure there are ways to save money, but there is no way of cutting something like $800 billion and 80,000 troops without ending up with a really small military force. Certainly not one that is NOT big enough given all of our global commitments. So if that’s your idea of saving money, have at it. But don’t expect us to be there in force if, say, North Korea decides to invade South Korea, or if China threatens Japan over offshore fishing/drilling rights, or if China wakes up one day and tries to take over Taiwan.
Your Ron Paul skirt is showing. But don’t leap to conclusions before you really know what people have to say. And if we really cut as much as Obama wants to cut, we really will be in no better shape than we were in when World War II started, only we’ll have nuclear weapons. Unless that’s what Ron Paul and Obama want to rely on, nuclear weapons to solve all of our problems. Well, it didn’t work in the 1950s in Korea or in the 1960s in Vietnam or in TWO Persian Gulf Wars, and it will not work now.
“But don’t expect us to be there in force if, say, North Korea decides to invade South Korea, or if China threatens Japan over offshore fishing/drilling rights, or if China wakes up one day and tries to take over Taiwan.”
- Militarily speaking, South Korea can MORE than handle itself with the North. They don’t need us there.
You’re thinking about war with China? Meh, whatever. We don’t need fleets to fight China. We don’t need 100+ divisions. We don’t need F-35s. All we’d have to do is shutter up Walmart and the like and then watch their economy fall apart in days.
China will eventually implode on it’s own. That sounds counter intuitive, I know, what with their soaring GDP. The problem is they need that just to stay going. If their GDP grows slows, not reverses, SLOWS by any real amount, the squeeze will be on. They also have truly catastrophic social problems that are growing worse and worse and which will erupt terribly when the wealth spigot starts slacking off soon. These are problems that they could have handled before, but the very ideology of their ruling class prevents them from even being recognized.
China is playing a bigger shell game than even we were/are with money and wealth.
Actually it was the isolationists in Congress. Roosevelt was the one who was boycotting Japan and lend leasing old destroyers to Britain. FDR was preparing for war, unfortunately the Japanese already were.
Before 9/11 the Taliban invited Al Qaeda and assorted jihadists to establish terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Many thousands of graduates left and went to other countries to do what terrorists do.
After we unilaterally withdraw (AKA retreat) and the Taliban declare victory, and after they reassert control over Afghanistan, and after they consolidate their gains in Pakistan, is there any reason to think they will not do the same again? I can’t really think of one, as they will then be largely invulnerable to almost any US attack. There is good reason to think that Afghanistan will once again become a safe base and home for terrorists.
Anyone who doubts this should look at a map. Afghanistan is very hard to get at and it is fairly large. We had trouble getting into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 when we had allies in the region, including the Northern Alliance. It will be a lot harder when we have no allies in the region. Not only will there not be a Northern Alliance, we would have to go through countries now hostile to us to get there, Russia and ex-Soviet satellites and/or Pakistan — countries that would have no interest in helping us and that would have reasons to deliberately thwart us.
Explain to me exactly what “winning” in Afghanistan is? How long are we supposed to stay? What is the end game? What are we aiming to accomplish? Installing a pro US democracy? That’s an abject failure. The destruction of the Taliban? Might as well go to war with cockroaches. What do we have to show for 10 years of service members blood staining the ground of Afghanistan? So us being there keeps them from coming here. How long is that going to be an adequate excuse? We can’t stay in a state of perpetual war, but that seems to be the only strategy being offered up. The problem is that the ones offering the strategy aren’t the ones holding the rifles, or watching their children grow up in a series of photos on Facebook (if they are even lucky enough to have Internet). And people wonder about the appeal Ron Paul has with service members. Maybe after 4-5 deployments with no end in sight they are starting to grow weary of fighting endless battles with no forseeable end.
“Explain to me exactly what “winning” in Afghanistan is? … The destruction of the Taliban? Might as well go to war with cockroaches.”
- I’m with you. Our intelligence services and those of other countries report that Bin Ladin’s network is basically destroyed in Afghanistan and the man himself is dead. If reports are to be believed, Bin Laden was more concerned with the fact that their bank accounts were basically empty than with plotting any new attacks.
We should leave. Yes the Taliban is still there. It will be for a long time. They aren’t interested in coming to the US to fight us. They’ll stay in their backward little wilderness and sell opium to the Europeans, like they’ve always done.
Thats not necessarily my assertion. The fact is that the US is still obsessed with the COIN strategy which has literally lost us every conflict its been used in, and the idea that we can go into a country that is inherantly hostile to us on a basic religious and cultural level and install and western democracy and everything will be great. Its this type of short sightedness that has us spread thin all over the world fighting wars that never seem to end. The fact is that the simple threat of brutal retaliation by US forces should be enough to deter aggression, and initially we had that, and instead of getting out while we were ahead we decided stick around and try to make a nice west friendly government. Look how that has worked out for us.
Actually, I thought this was probably your position when I wrote my original response to you. And yes, I still agree with you.
“Are we really more secure?” You tell me………We can’t even fight O’bamas war without breaking the rules.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/news/world/2012/01/marines-career-threatened-controversial-rules-engagement/2127401
the gutting of U.S. defense???????
nothing could be further from the truth; that’s an absolute lie
it’s time for the American public to receive an education on this issue
900 bases in 130+ countries
most managed by KBR of Halliburton fame
the $20 a plate people
The U.S. Spends More on Defense than Next Top 14 Countries Combined
http://bit.ly/s0vwzo
Wiki List of countries by military expenditures
http://bit.ly/dRAFp9
U.S. Defense Spending http://bit.ly/hNKDG6
Cost Of War http://bit.ly/eaGXTP
World Military Spending http://bit.ly/3MRsP0
Military Spending http://bit.ly/fN6BfT
900 bases in 130+ countries – baloney! a few soldiers stationed at an embassy somewhere is not a base.
I guess you’ll be able to name 1/2 of those “bases”
“As the tide of war recedes… .”
A favorite lefty conceit. “War is just so unfashionable now…We’ve grown beyond that sort of unpleasantness…” The trouble is that those who don’t like us fail to agree – which makes the whole idea invalid.
the gutting of U.S. defense???
– FALSE
- EDUCATION
- The U.S. Spends More on Defense than Next Top 14 Countries Combined http://bit.ly/hNKDG6
face-it,
it is irrelevant what other countries spend.
Anita Dunn
Obama campaign
In April 2008, it was announced that Dunn, who had joined the Obama campaign in February, would be the director of communications, policy and research operations for Obama for America, where she held the title Senior Adviser and was one of the major decision makers of the Obama campaign. She was featured as one of four top advisers (along with David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs) in a 60 Minutes interview held after then President-elect Obama’s November 4, 2008 victory speech at Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. She was described, in the 60 Minutes interview, as, “a relative newcomer who handled communications, research and policy.”During the presidential transition of 2008-09″, Dunn trained White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs
Mao Tse Tung “Favorite Philosopher” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi1zg2NOCn8
You place yourself into my AO, involving yourself in a hostile Operation, and I will fire you up.
The rest is just plain nonsense.
The USA cannot continue with this delirium that we are capable of policing the world and that anything we think is God’s truth.
We have to pull back and concentrate on strengthening our economy. Taking cheap shots at President Obama is not going to solve our problems.
Our Republican-dominated congress can’t seem to do anything to create jobs and yet it thinks that more defense spending is OK. Are they all nuts?
Hank
Semper Fi
Hank, I guess our socialist president and a democrat dominated senate that have done nothing for three years have nothing to do with it.
Gray man
Sua Sponte
Extremely well written, well thought out article.