You’d hardly notice though, would you? Perhaps another constitutional amendment is in order here, incorporating exactly such language in the Constitution, declaring that the United States may never go to war except under one of those two circumstances. Of course, constitutional language can be bent or broken, just as the Bush administration has done with nearly every single provision in the document. But it makes it harder to do and more obvious when it’s happening if you have it set down in black and white in our core governing contract.
FIVE: Anyone who violates these provisions should be punished. Once again, as in so many of the cases above, the remedy for this problem already exists. It’s called the International Criminal Court, and it’s been in existence since 2002. Meanwhile, for just as long, the United States government under the Bush administration has been at great pains to undermine the Court in every way possible, with the effort initially spearheaded by that beacon of international justice, the lovely John Bolton.
Given that to the rest of the world there’s little distinction between Bush’s invasion of Iraq and, say, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it isn’t real hard to figure out why the administration has worked so assiduously to destroy the Court, including by unsigning American participation in the treaty and by arm-twisting every other country in the world to sign bilateral agreements exempting Americans from the Court’s jurisdiction.
One way to end needless American wars is to give those who make such policies a very personal reason for some serious and sober second thought. The next president should re-sign us up to the ICC, push for Senate ratification, and rip up all the bilateral exemption agreements. Then it might be time for an arrest or six to be made. What did you say is George Bush’s address in Crawford?
SIX: Americans have a reputation for being the most blinkered nation in the developed world, and we got that the old-fashioned way: We earned it! We’ve tried hard not to study history and geography, and damned if we aren’t ignorant as hell as a result. And proud if it!
The darned thing is, though, it turns out that ignorance is expensive. I know, I know – who’d-a-thunk-it? But it’s true. When you’re dumb as a tree (and my apologies to all those trees out there – I know you have feelings too!), your government can do lots of things to you, like turn you into cannon fodder, steal your money through taxes for the purpose of killing people you’re not even angry at, or ruin your reputation among billions of people you’ve never met.
Painful as the whole notion of education might be, it turns out to be a lot less painful than the alternative. I know it’s a radical idea, but these are desperate times. Anyhow, what if we actually taught our children a little history, a little geography, and a little truth? Might we not avoid a war or two in the future?
It was good to see MSNBC dump that little bow-tied twit, Tucker Carlson, off the airwaves not long ago. If seeking a better educated American public is our goal, getting disinformation-wielding, Rove-programmed, little weenies like this guy off the air represents a small but promising start. Please, sir, may I have some more?
SEVEN: God help us if there actually is a god. What an amazingly twisted little culture we are, eh? If judgement day ever does come I hope I’m not the one called upon to explain American (would-be) morality to the really pissed-off dude with the long white beard. I don’t even know how I could. Something tells me that he would be a lot less concerned about who’s been diddling whom, Mr. Falwell, than about our unfortunate tendency to countenance the murder of millions in bogus wars fought in our name.
Yeah, I’m afraid the ugly truth is that we think nothing of bombing the snot out of third-world countries, with all the "collateral damage" that entails, but can’t seem to stop obsessing about which sexual organ happens to go into which orifice while people seek a little pleasure in the privacy of our own homes. If our moral priorities were any more twisted they would look like the entrails of a million dead Iraqi civil... Oh, never mind.
I don’t know how we get from here to there, but somehow we have to learn the lesson that war is almost never the right answer. We have to follow the path of the Europeans who, at enormous first-hand cost, have figured this one out and have by-and-large adopted a more thoughtful and just position on this question. We, as a society, need a morality befitting the twenty-first century, not the first (and not even the twentieth).
Altogether these seven ideas for curbing the American propensity for militarism are not the entire solution to the problem. Even so, neither would they be easy to implement. Some of them would require constitutional amendments. Some of them would require a sea change in American political culture. I’m not sure which of these would be more daunting to accomplish.
But accomplished they must be, and America’s addiction to war must be curbed somehow, and soon. The costs of continuing on the current path are enormous, which is also why they are so carefully hidden from us at... well, all costs.
It certainly takes courage to go to war. A lot more than it does to camp out in the Situation Room and order other peoples’ kids to go. But given the culture we live in today, it may take nearly as much courage to make war prohibitively difficult. Standing up for peace and sanity in an asylum of militarism has never exactly been an easy ride, either.
This country fancies itself as the home of the brave, but I wonder if it’s ready for as scary a challenge as making itself peaceful.
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