WARNING: This is about foreign policy and American politics, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Levant. If you are not deeply interested in policy questions, this will likely bore you beyond tears.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I GOT TIRED OF WONKING AND STOPPED MIDWAY. GUESS MY OWN INTEREST IN POLICY QUESTIONS WANED. SO HERE’S A PARTIAL POST FROM OVER THE WEEKEND AND THINK WHAT YOU MAY
In a way, this is about the path not taken.
We live in a finite world.
America has great power, perhaps more than all the rest of the countries of the world and certainly more than any one other country.
However, there are limits.
The latest video on Al Jazeera of Osama bin Laudin in the tribal areas of Pakistan is a perfect refutation of the notion of unlimited American power.
That’s a simplistic point, but it has its larger implications.
Because we have 150,000 American troops in Iraq, those troops are not capable of also being on the Korean peninsula. They can’t be in two places at once.
Making the choice to have American armies in Baghdad is to also choose not to place them elsewhere.
Similarly, spending $200 Billion prosecuting the American presence in Iraq means that money is not being spent on health care.
To spend that $200 Billion at all has economic consequences since most of it is borrowed money that is globally inflating the U.S. dollar, increasing our national debt, etc., etc.
We can’t do everything. We can’t do just anything. And, we can’t do all of what we’d like to do at one time.
The point is fundamental, I agree, but since it is fundamental, it’s important and must be at the forefront of our thinking, in my view, especially at the current crossroads we face in that arc of discord that goes from India-Pakistan across the great mountains of Afghanistan and into the crescent of Trade Route cities from Kabul through Teheran through Baghdad and Damascus to the Mediterranean Beirut, then south to Jeruselem.
One of the points I want to make here is that although this is a very important part of the world and although what is happening there is extremely important, we focus on those problems to the exclusion of other problems.
There is also war in Somalia.
North Korea is testing long range missiles and building A-bombs.
It is arguable that narco terrorists are controlling the governments of Mexico, Bolivia and Myanmar in Asia.
The tribal warfare atrocities of West Africa are devastating the continent.
Natural disaster, tsunamis and earthquakes and drouth for example, are killing thousands and the earth is warming at an alarming rate.
It seems we have ad hoc responses across the globe, but the finite choices principle I’ve enunciated above seems also to argue that we have only one foreign policy and that it is an integrated and integral part of our overall governing philosophy. We make choices that determine our priorities both at home and abroad.
As ethereal as these choices may seem, I’ll remind you that the consequence of America’s foreign policy choices is driving up the price of gasoline as you read this. You may think that good or bad, but it certainly affects your everyday life. The value of your work can be expressed in the price of a shirt at Target and that is a function of the value of the American dollar expressed in China’s Yuan. It is one world. A global market means that what you buy and what you sell and what you earn depends on what is going on in the world and how America is responding to and/or shaping those events.
What do you think would happen if, instead of being in Iraq in 2007, we spent $200 Billion having the military install wind power generators and photoelectric cell panels in the desert of Arizona and Nevada?
How would things be different if we thought about where we wanted to be and where we wanted the world to be in a hundred years instead of next year or next week?