US Troops Posed With Afghan Corpses in Photos

[Haruko]

Along those lines, if I correctly understand, when American troops were amassing in Kuwait in the lead up to the Second Gulf War, Iraq, if it had the gall, would have been justified by international law if it struck first, since that would be a preemptive war. In contrast, America engaged in what is called preventative war, which is certainly not condoned by international law.

[SAMAS]

Technically, yeah. It's his fault that he didn't.

I get the feeling Bush would've been happy if he had.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, your scenario does not work because the US doctrine is only partly one of self-defence. The wars they have started so far are not wars of self-defence but wars of aggression (save the one in Afghanistan).

So change the doctrine and stop picking unnecessary fights. It's still a hell of a lot cheaper. Your nation ends up being just as secure if you do this, really. No one can actually invade or conquer it, or any of its allies, or even do anything really horrendous that affects your trade and such... as long as you're actually willing to push the nuclear button when you say you are.

So my scenario would work fine; all it would require is a slight realignment of the US's goals and priorities, with less gratuitous beating people up for the hell of it.

Shep's suggested this before, and as far as I can tell he's not actually wrong- it reminds me of the time he once proposed to solve the Social Security crisis with nukes. No, wait, stop laughing, seriously.

His idea was to upgrade the bomber fleet so there'd be an effective deterrent force that could, coincidentally, do conventional bombing if necessary. Then we'd scale back more or less everything else in the military, saving... I don't remember, some twelve-digit number of dollars on annual defense expenses. Then we'd use the proceeds to keep Social Security afloat. As far as I can tell, he's not wrong about the math.

Of course, we wouldn't be able to invade Iraqistan any more, but really, who cares except the guys who view the Department of Defense as a gigantic penis compensator?

If your policy is simply "we never fight wars ever," then any dickheads out there in the world will have no reason to refrain from messing with you.

Let me stop you right there because there are other reasons than fear to refrain from messing with someone, such as trade disruptions and their own morality. Of course, leaders are pretty good at lying to get past their people's moral concerns, but trade is a big one and completely unemotional...

That works for small scale messing around, which is fine. It doesn't work so well for the big stuff like "Hitler decides to invade Poland."

Basically, the idea is that you use the horrible deterrent force to stop any real assholes from doing the big nasty stuff (for this purpose it doesn't actually have to be nukes, but nukes are the superweapon that works in real life so yeah).

Then, if you're worried about the little annoying stuff like unwelcome tariffs or people hassling your merchants or political oppression of some minority group you feel sorry for, that's when you start playing around with trade and things like that. It might not work, but you accept that, because ultimately it is the small stuff and if you really have to, you can just go "meh" and not sweat it too much. It's not the end of the world.

You use the little stuff to play tit-for-tat regarding the little stuff, and the big threats to deter the big stuff that is actually enough of a problem that you need to defend against it.

This was... actually pretty close to official US Cold War policy in some areas once upon a time. What happened was that the government couldn't resist the impulse to make lots of allies overseas as part of the whole Cold War thing, and it was (correctly) pointed out that the "massive retaliation" doctrine had a big blank spot in it as far as those allies were concerned. Because while we might have a treaty of alliance with Outer Nowherestan, it was very hard for anyone to believe we'd actually fight a nuclear war to defend Outer Nowherestan from the Soviets. If we didn't have a conventional army to back Outer Nowherestan up, they'd start thinking very hard about doing what the Soviets wanted, and the US security establishment of the time decided not to be willing to live with that.

Which was a conscious choice they didn't have to make that way if they didn't want to.

[Thanas]

Simon, your scenario does not work because the US doctrine is only partly one of self-defence. The wars they have started so far are not wars of self-defence but wars of aggression (save the one in Afghanistan).

So change the doctrine and stop picking unnecessary fights.

Washington is not interested in that. It will take a massive loss like the Vietnam war to actually get the US to rethink its priorities.

[Simon_Jester]

I didn't say it was likely to happen. I just said it would work, and would probably be a good idea.

[Simon_Jester]

Then we'd scale back more or less everything else in the military, saving...

There's two sides to the military too.... on one hand, it is a massive tool of evil and tyranny.

On the other hand, it is a massive redistribution of wealth scheme. A lot of those dollars saved might have gone to jobs for minorities, education for young adults, jobs for local contractors, health care; all kinds of district pork shit.

Well yeah, but they'd be going to something else instead anyway, like you said. I know it'd be tricky, but you could do it. Like, say, hiring a bazillion people to rebuild bridges and replace all the miles and miles of 1900-vintage water pipe in our cities. Stuff like that.

It's never hard to think of things to do with a hundred billion dollars. It's really harder to think of things not to do with a hundred billion dollars, once you've got them handy.

That works for small scale messing around, which is fine. It doesn't work so well for the big stuff like "Hitler decides to invade Poland."

The idea is to prevent things from getting to that point if at all possible; fix the problem while it is small, so the scale doesn't get out of control.

I used to think Dennis Kucinich's Department of Peace idea sounded silly, but now I think it is a really good idea, since doing the little things right long term is going to be hard, but can prevent it from adding up.

The problem is knowing in advance what sounds like a good idea. Whatever combination of events actually happens is always one that somebody could have prevented with really small butterfly-effect stuff. That doesn't mean anyone could possibly have predicted what would have happened in advance and gotten it right; stopping the butterfly from flapping its wings to cause a hurricane over here could cause two hurricanes over there.

So I don't think you can put the bulk of your trust in being able to keep major bad news from happening- to have that kind of power and influence over the world would almost require you to conquer it to save it from itself.

I think it's best to just deal with things day by day, but to do so in a responsible and intelligent way and sometimes be able to man up and admit "yeah, we lost this round." Which is something the US has not been able to do since 1941, and which has probably hurt us a lot more than government-state-security-military-industrial-political types would admit.

This was... actually pretty close to official US Cold War policy in some areas once upon a time.

Another problem with the cold war though was fighting an idea. The Soviets didn't have to invade countries for them to flirt with communism... but we couldn't let them actually convert!

The Soviets did, I have to say, have a lot to do with many countries' decision to quit flirting with communism and move in with it. But more generally, that does illustrate the problem- to stick to massive retaliation doctrine and refrain from warmongering, the US would have to be willing to acknowledge that some countries were not worth keeping clear of communism, or admit defeat in some countries where communists had a major local advantage. This was not palatable to the establishment, or for that matter to much of the American people.