Obama Doesn’t Get to Say He is Tired of War
Obama Doesn’t Get to Say He is Tired of War by Eliot Cohen, Washington Post.
It is the phrase of the moment, dropping from the lips of television reporters and radio commentators, salting the columns of pundits, earnestly being spoken by furrow-browed politicians of serious mien.
The families of the fallen are entitled to war-weariness. So are those wounded in body or spirit, and their loved ones. The mother who has sent her son to war has a right to war-weariness, as does the father who prepares to send his daughter to battle again and again. But for the great mass of the American public, for their leaders and the elites who shape public opinion, “war-weariness” is unearned cant, unworthy of a serious nation and dangerous in a violent world…
Americans aren’t war weary, they are war skeptical. They don’t believe that the proposed benefits outweigh the potential costs, either for Americans or for others.
I wonder if the sort of hysteria demonstrated in the article is really a worry that the good old days of Americans accepting any old justification for military action is over–at least for the time being–and thereby the “accruing money and power” party is over for certain members of the Cafe Milano class?
Plus, some people in the DC foreign policy world (and other Western capitals) are deeply invested emotionally in the idea that their gaze–and their gaze alone–saves the world. They are deeply and weirdly into the savior-complex:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-this-town-loves-going-to-war/
A million articles and books like the above these days. And the Senatorial and Congressional phone lines burning up against intervention not to mention the British Parliament voting against Syrian action (thank you, British cousins. Thank you for putting a break on the toxic relationship between our elites and yours, the post Cold War getting into trouble together dynamic) must be galling.
What would happen if we put as much effort into helping refugees? I wonder what it’s like to be considered a blood sacrifice to uphold an international legal norm, to be waiting for the bombs?