As I’ve said before, if you want to know what official Washington is thinking, read Wash Post columnist David Ignatius. In his latest and greatest, David fills us in on what the Pentagon is thinking.
The good news is, the Pentagon wants to stay out of the Middle East: “This generation of military leaders has been through traumatic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve cautioned President Obama about the potential cost in lives and money of new commitments in the Middle East, and they’ll do the same with the next commander in chief. If you want to hear arguments against deploying a big U.S. ground force in Syria, just ask a general.”
Well, that’s damn good to hear. The first refuge of a scoundrel is to promise, if elected, to consult “our military leaders” and follow their advice as gospel, because nothing covers your ass like the top brass.
What’s not so good to hear: instead of “getting tough” with small nations like Syria, the Pentagon wants to get tough with big nations like Russia and China: “To contain Russia, the next administration will probably examine whether to deploy U.S. forces in Eastern Europe, as a tripwire against Moscow’s aggression. That move would likely have Pentagon support. The military would also welcome more active moves to contain China’s actions in the South China Sea, including closer cooperation with allies such as Japan and the Philippines, which are bolstering their own defenses.”
Yes, the Pentagon hates hot wars (and who can blame them?) but they love cold ones. Harassing Russia and China, neither of which threaten our security, is about as dumb a policy as one can imagine, unless, of course, the real point of your “strategy” is ever-increasing defense budgets, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on ever-more exotic weapons, weapons that don’t even have to work, because the whole point of spending the money is to show our “resolve,” rather than to fight wars, which is the one thing we don’t want to do.
Afterwords
Wasting hundreds of billions of dollars is bad enough, but the ultimate danger, of course, is that chest-pounding leaders in the U.S., Russia, and China who rise to power playing the nationalism card can inadvertently back themselves, and each other, into corners from which the only “honorable” escape is war. This is exactly what happened in Ukraine. Western nations, striving nobly to “save” Ukraine from Putin’s vulgar embrace, unwittingly triggered a situation that left the easily embarrassed Mr. Putin “no choice” but to seize Crimea. And, once you get into a war, it is not so easy to get out, as our “forever war” in Afghanistan so clearly demonstrates.
