Maverick: Another name for cowboy.

Somewhere between Andrew Bacevich’s “He told us to go Shopping” and the Washington Post news story “Standard Warfare May be Eclipsed by Nation-Building” (both in Sunday 10-5-08) lies the answer to this nation’s economic crisis, our defeat of terrorism and our future leadership in this increasingly troubled world.
If after or even before the attacks on 9-11 President Bush had asked Americans to buckle down economically and invest a small part of our relative wealth in boosting the wealth of all people in all nations via foreign aid -- instead of shopping domestically or visiting Disney world, we wouldn’t be in the world of hurt we are today.
Stability operations, nation building or ‘development’ -- whatever you want to call it -- is as vital to our economic prosperity as it is to draining the swamp of future terrorists. But, expecting the U.S. Army or the American tax payers to achieve this essential endeavor alone is futile.
After the suffering of the last great depression and the horrors of the last World War America led the world in creating a new international institution aimed at preventing war and suffering for future generations. But when we gave the UN the most aspirating objectives, we failed to give it the power or the resources to achieve them. And now we either blame the UN or ignore it when its ideals and an empowered reforms are needed most urgently.
Our next President will inherit a giant sucking sound of dollars and power leaving our still great nation. Investment in a new global marshall plan as outlined in H. Res 1078 could help prevent more costly crisis that are inevitable. Both candidates are calling for change but small change isn’t going to do it. And, H.Res 1078 proposes funding changes for nation building that won’t add to our deficit or detract from our military readiness.
On Sept. 18, 2001, when then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said "We have a choice, either to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or to change the way that they live, and we chose the latter." He was dead wrong. Both presidential candidates know admit we need change. And one of them clearly articulates the change we need to make in how we relate to the rest of the world. And “maverick”? That’s just another name for cowboy.

Sovereignty is a myth

If David Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey believe the title of their opinion piece “Border Security equals Sovereignty” (8-14-08) they need a refresher course in reality. ‘Border security’ is a mythical ideal impossible to achieve in an increasingly and irreversibly interdependent world.
Federal officials might stop a few papers or laptop computers from crossing our border each month but the daily volume of dangerous information accessible on the world wide web, via emails or stuffed into any bushel of marihuana smuggled across our borders each day dwarfs any lucky federal finds. And, there appears to be no shortage of federal inspection officers capable of error or open to bribes. Have Rivkin and Casy bothered to calculate what would it cost our government to inspect all the laptops of the 400 million travelers who enter the US each year? And, what about the latest data storage devises like IPods that can store more information than 2 year old laptops but be smuggled inside a wallet.
Sovereignty is a political concept that current reality simply doesn’t recognize. A Nazi like regime can’t stop a pandemic from ravaging their nation and American seem incapable of kicking a dangerous addiction to foreign oil. An oil tanker filled with a fuel oil and fertilizer bomb could deliver a near nuclear sized detonation to any US port. And a biological weapon capable of killing more Americans than a limited nuclear exchange can be smuggle in the blood stream of any individual.
How do Rivkin and Casey propose ‘sovereignty’ will stop the effects of climate change or defend us against cyber attacks by those who know sovereignty is an outdated notion?
“The inspection” that “revealed approximately $79,000 in unlawful US currency” is a joke when one considers the hundreds of billions of unregulated currency that crosses our border each day by electronic currency trading and illegal electronic offshore deposits.

Only the dumbest of terrorist would try to carry something across our border that an inspector could find. What to Rivkin and Casey have to offer for the more creative terrorists? A wiji board? Lawyers like Rivkin and Casey may be good at understanding laws but they carry no credibility in dealing with the real world we all now live in.

Half truths better than ignorance

Nelson Marans and Serge Wing simply don’t get it (Obama’s dangerous path 2-21-08). But they needn’t take my words or Obama’s more reasoned and non-lethal approach to dealing with the threat of terrorism to understand the fallacy of thinking more military “muscle” is needed to defeat terrorism.

Just last November U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said "One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications,” were also “essential ingredients”. Gates also said “the attacks of September 11 marked the dawn” of a “new era” distinct from previous war eras, and now “there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security." He also acknowledged that Pentagon supporters (like Marans and Wing) would consider this "blasphemy".

Marans and Wing could also review the recent survey of more than 3,400 active and retired officers -- 10 percent of whom served in Iraq, Afghanistan or both. Even a majority of these military professionals agreed that more muscular military assets would not be as useful in assisting “the US military in winning the Global War on Terror” as “diplomacy tools”, “intelligence”, “language skills”, “civilian experts” and “economic development assistance”.

It’s clear that many other patriotic Americans like Marans and Wing are still stuck in a pre-9-11 era mindset even after super military powers like the US and the Soviets loss insurgent wars against Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Mr. Morans claims I “essentially endorse a policy of surrender to terrorism and the nations that support it.” The US and the Soviet Union didn’t ‘surrender’ to Vietnam or Afghanistan. We (and the Soviets) simply stopped fighting a war that wasn’t worth the cost.

Devoting our limited resources towards policies that effectively reduce terrorism… instead of using military muscle that creats 10 terrorists for every one we kill -- isn’t a policy of surrender. It’s a smart policy that works against a relatively small group of mass murderers whose organizational structure is nearly identical to the Mafia , not the Nazis.

Mr. Wing claims my “Platitudes…are at best half correct” but then asserts that we had a real “coalition” going into Iraq. He then claims that “12 years of noncompliance” and “17 violations” were legitimate “acts of war” by Iraq – and my “criticisms” of Bush’s Iraq war are “outdated” given “recent successes”. I believe it’s completely accurate to say that the tens of thousands of people who lost loved ones on both sides of this unnecessary conflict will consider all of Mr. Wing’s statements far less than half correct.

And finally, anyone who seriously claims that “water boarding” is not torture because they ‘experience it’ under peace time conditions at the hands of their own professional colleagues…doesn’t really know the difference between reality and half truths.