Perhaps in good faith, but certainly unwittingly, the current President during his campaigns and his Presidency thus far, has repeatedly conveyed the idea that reduced military engagement and a friendlier posture toward even hostile sovereign states would keep this nation’s enemies at bay. Unfortunately, for him, the current prevailing view in Washington DC is that Russian aggression in the Ukraine and the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have turned the public more hawkish and interventionist. And this view is backed up by a lot of recent polling. For example, a Pew poll found a growing number of Americans who thought the United States was doing “ too little ” to solve international problems, while 54 percent said President Obama’s approach to foreign policy and national security was “ not tough enough. ” But before anyone can seize on this as evidence that Americans are now on the side of hawkish action, it’s also very telling that just 34 percent in these same polls supported sending combat troops. Another way of thinking about this is that Americans don’t like it when the bad guys are kicking the U.S. around on the world stage and our President doesn’t seem to have any sort of plan to do anything about it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that, in actuality, they are willing to do whatever it takes to stop the bad guys. President Bush carefully anticipated this in his speech to a joint session of Congress following the attacks. He told the members of the military to be ready, but advised Americans to go back to their lives and keep the economy thriving. There was never a broader effort to mobilize the home front. And when he invaded Iraq and attempted to build a democracy there, he did so with a relatively small number of troops intending to leave a light footprint. In time, Americans turned on the war and elected President Obama on a pledge to end the conflict. The decision to withdraw troops from Iraq, blamed for creating the vacuum that led to the Islamic State, was overwhelmingly supported by the American public at the time, even among those who assumed it would turn into a safe haven for terrorists. When it comes to domestic policy, politicians running for office typically eschew the idea that any tradeoffs exist. They offer tax simplification proposals that promise to lower rates by getting rid of loopholes and deductions, but they don’t specify which ones. They make elaborate promises about new benefits they plan to offer, but are suddenly silenced when it comes to detailing the programs they plan to cut to offset the new spending. A similar process happens on foreign policy. Non-interventionists, who trace every national security problem back to an earlier U.S. policy, offer a promised land where butting out of world affairs actually makes the nation safer. And those who advocate military interventions are often not up front about the financial and human commitment needed to sustain such campaigns, or of the potential consequences of action. costsofwar.org/article/homeland-security-budget
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:00:32 +0000
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