Wag the Bulldog
Craig Goodrich
Rant Magazine
February 1998Now let me get this straight. Some nasty dictator in the Middle East won't let a bunch of uniformed foreign techies into military installations disguised to look like the Casbah, so everybody inside the Washington Beltway is all excited at the chance to drop fancy bombs (at half a million tax dollars or so a pop) all over the desert and maybe send in actual American troops ("troops", a noun meaning "hitherto healthy young people the politicians want to use for cannon fodder").
At the same time most of the tuxedo-wearing population of Manhattan is flying around the world telling other tuxedo-wearing people that if we just let this nasty dictator sell a little more of his oil maybe we won't have to bomb him at all, even if his mustache does look like Joe Stalin's, and somehow we can make sure he spends all this lovely money on nice medical supplies and food for his people, even though he's never cared a tinker's damn about his people before.
This is all supposed to make sense and constitute a wise and statesmanlike foreign policy. Give me a break.
If, for the sake of argument, whatever Saddam is doing poses a direct, immediate, and obvious threat to our freedom and security within the borders of the United States, and if these inspections would eliminate that threat, then we tell Saddam, "Within 48 hours the sites will be either a) inspected or b) vaporized; the choice is yours." We do not dither and dawdle and prattle about "international support" or "multilateral consensus"; after all, we are dealing with an immediate threat.
But if -- as seems much more likely -- all Saddam's scheming and bluster has less relevance to the survival of the American way of life than does the current weather over Brazil's coffee plantations, then we just forget about it and let the politicians find some other way of filling the headlines and squandering our money. They're professionals at doing that, anyway. That's their job.
"But," I hear Ms Albright whimper, "what about our International Commitments? What about our Credibility?" "And what," adds a chorus of politicians from districts with large defense plants in them, "about letting down our Brave Boys (er, ah, and Girls, ah, Women) who fought in the Gulf War?"
As to the Gulf War, it never made any sense in the first place, however bravely and brilliantly American forces defeated the ill-trained army of a backward Third World dictator. We had to "protect our oil supplies", but Kuwaiti oil is exported overwhelmingly to Europe and Japan, not to the US, and Middle Eastern oil would flow no matter who controlled the Gulf: the countries there need the money. We had to "defend freedom", so we restored a jet-set version of medieval monarchy. We had to "stand by our allies," but Israel has the most modern and sophisticated defense forces in the world (compliments, largely, of American taxpayers); Saudi Arabia runs an oil-welfare state full of spoiled half-employed young men, presumably available to defend their country if necessary; and since when is Syria, for heaven's sake, our ally?
So the ones who let down our military in the Gulf War were George Bush and the elite Beltway crowd who sent them over there in the first place, putting their lives and health at risk for no discernible reason.
But OK, Madeleine, (passing over the term "credibility" without actually laughing) let's suppose that there really is an identifiable "International Community", that the UN represents it, and that it has to "do something" about Saddam. Why does the United States have to be the one to "do something?"
After all, we're finally beginning to enjoy the economic fruits of a "balanced" federal budget (not really balanced, but at least not growing quite as fast as usual), and that "balance" is due in large part to radical cuts in the defense budget. How about letting somebody else in your vaunted "International Community" carry the ball (or the bomb) this time?
How about, for example, somebody like Britain? They did pretty well with Argentina a little while back, and Tony Blair was just in Washington telling Bill what great friends an allies we were.
Besides, the Brits really owe us one -- to say the least. This whole century, we've been expending our lives and treasure to pull British irons out of the fire, and it's cost us a lot. Anglophile Woodrow Wilson got us into World War I to save them from the consequences of their absurd foreign policy; that set the stage for anglophile (and opportunist) Franklin Roosevelt to save Britain again in World War II (also known, of course, as The War To Hide The Failure Of The New Deal).
Come to think of it, the Great Depression itself was largely due to the American Federal Reserve's attempt to bail out the Bank of England, or at least that's the conclusion of Alan Greenspan, who wrote in 1966:
... More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt [starting in 1927] to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable)...
The "Fed" succeeded: it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market -- triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves ... But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching ... As a result, the American economy collapsed... The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's.
And Alan, of all people, should know. So anyhow, Madeleine, how about calling in all those British IOUs and letting British politicians benefit from the distraction of a Jolly Little War?
Besides, the Brits get political sex scandals all the time. It should be our turn, now that we've finally got the American press almost actually reporting some of the corruption in the Clinton administration. It's not fair to take advantage of our mass media's attention deficit disorder by making them send a crowd of Tom Brokaws and Wolf Blitzers to the desert to cover the Zippergate War. Therefore do not send to ask for whom the belle strolls, my friends ....*
* And speaking of war correspondents, one of the best passed away in February: Martha Gellhorn, who married Papa Hemingway about a month after the first publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940. Her sensitivity and writing skill more than compensated for her naive politics; the world has lost a genuine original.
Computer guru Craig Goodrich lives in a house in the woods in Elkmont, with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is the Huntsville district representative of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, a smoker, and a gun owner.