How To End War: Let The Hawks Do The War fighting

Are the British smarter than us or just more tired of combat?

I want to thank the British for keeping Americans from once again going to war as a means to a political end. It’s been widely published that Britain’s Parliament voted against military action on Syria, a move ardently supported by our government as a reprisal for Syria using chemical weapons on its own citizens.

Thank you Brits!

Seriously. The fight in Syria is terrible indeed. But our intervention efforts feel half-hearted at best and are politically motivated at worst: pundits in the mainstream news media have claimed if the President doesn’t live up to his “red line in the sand” ultimatum, then he will appear weak.

So what if the President appears weak? He shouldn’t have said what he said about that red line in the sand. His is no less a gaff than Secretary of State John Kerry’s “unbelievably small” comment two weeks ago. He should have apologized for it when he said it. 

As some who are against striking Syria are already pointing out, a limited, no-boots-on-the-ground strike would have little real impact and achieve nothing other than showing that the President means what he says. It will not curb crimes taking place on the ground and it certainly won’t end the fighting.

BTW, where was the call for intervention when millions of lives were being massacred in Rwanda? Doesn’t the death toll in that internal conflict dwarf the killing in Syria? Were acts of violence there even more heinous? And yet the US didn’t raise a finger militarily to intervene, when the entire world knew without a doubt atrocities were being committed.

American politics more and more has little meaning for everyday Americans other than serving as an extremely expensive form of entertainment, if you can call it that. While our government focuses on issues that capture media attention and really are none of our business, there are Americans at home still reeling from a devastating recession and a painfully slow recovery. Little has been done that goes far enough to prevent a repeat of 2008. In Corporate America, on Wall Street and Washington, it’s business as usual. Meanwhile, Americans go on without jobs, living on the street, with no food, and paying out the nose for their healthcare and education.

After the Copiosis Capitalism™ upgrade, Americans don’t have to waste productive time, energy, and money playing politics. We can just get things done. If some Americans feel so strongly about military action in a foreign land, they can arm themselves and go do what they feel needs to be done. No more playing the hawk while sending other people’s children to die in wars that accomplish nothing and sometimes make things worse. If they succeed and it makes the world better for Americans – measured in objective, after-the-fact assessments – they may get paid for the effort. But most Americans will not care about the goings-on in places where it’s none of our business unless those goings on demand humanitarian aid. What that does is it frees up a whole lot of resources we can use to make America stronger where it counts. At home.

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