Charles Milliken: Sometimes you just thave to give war a chance
Rodney King famously asked, “Can’t we all get along?” No, Rodney, we can’t. Never have, and probably, this side of heaven, never will.
Pride, anger, lust, gluttony, sloth, greed and envy — probably not an exhaustive list of deadly sins — have always been with us, and show no signs of going away. These ineradicable human failings have been behind all manner of unrest, from World War II to domestic violence. The only times when these vices are kept under control is when there are powerful social and cultural controls and, those failing, brute force. As you are reading this, we are seeing the failure of timely application of a little brute force, and now face the prospect of all-out war — the most brutal of brute force.
As the bombs and missiles fly, we must ask what went wrong? After World War I, and again after WWII, after we fought wars to end wars, and twice ushered in new world orders — the League of Nations, then the United Nations — we learned, once again, that good intentions are never sufficient. Don’t get me wrong — good intentions are necessary for any sort of decent order, but without sanctions behind them, they are not enough.
This leads, inescapably, to who applies the sanctions? Within the nation-state, the government, more or less effectively, keeps the lid on civil unrest and general mayhem. Internationally, however, it is a different story. Bad actors, whether individuals or nations, will act badly if they think they can get away with it. Or sometimes, truth be told, they will act badly from the sheer visceral joy of acting badly even if they know they won’t get away with it.
That leads to us, and our reaction to being fatally attacked in the Middle East. Some ask why are we in the Middle East to begin with? Indeed, why are we anywhere outside the bounds of the fifty states? From the founding of our nation, two fatal flaws have often bedeviled our foreign policy. One was isolationism, and the second, more or less related, was indifference to other tribes and nations killing each other. Are we our brother’s keeper?
For whatever concatenation of reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, the United States found itself, four hundred years after the first colonists landed, the most powerful nation the world had ever known — indeed so powerful in 1945 it would have been hard to imagine any combination of nations able to stop us from complete rule of the world. Alas, it was not to be. Bad actors, seeing that we were not going to assert our dominance, proceeded to act badly. The body count, world wide since 1945, is horrendous — including over 100,000 Americans killed in half-hearted attempts to keep the lid on. The total for non-Americans, including those killed by their own bad-acting governments, is in the tens of millions. Almost all of these would not have died if we had unmistakably put our foot down in 1945.
So here we are, once again half-heartedly trying to keep the bad actor du jour, Iran, from acting even more badly than it has. As I write, these pin-prick attacks on Iran’s proxies are designed to “send a message.” These send a message, all right: we, once again, are not serious. We don’t want to “provoke a wider war.” After all, didn’t we give Iran and its proxies several days of notice we were going to strike back? How non-provocative can you be? We gave them plenty of time to get out of Dodge before any damage was done, so if anyone insisted on sticking around, don’t blame us. We just, pretty please, want Iran to stop sending drones to kill American soldiers.
Iran won’t stop. They calculate we will not do what is necessary to do, which is to eliminate the current regime root and branch. All they have to do is wear out American resolve and watch us go back to our isolationist home, and fight among ourselves. Then, with nuclear arms and the billions in cash we’ve already given them, you can imagine the rest.
Leon Trotsky said you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
— Charles Milliken is a professor emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached at milliken.charles@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Charles Milliken: Sometimes you just thave to give war a chance
