Politics and Military

Click on the title to read a very thoughtful analysis of modern democracy and its relationship to the military.

I would like to comment on a problem I see developing in the US.

Bill Clinton attacked quite a number of countries during his terms. I count Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. Six, if I am not missing any.

The military did its duty in all these conflicts, all fairly small scale except Iraq and Yugoslavia. Iraq was ongoing during the entire 8 years, with daily overflights and numerous bombings of Iraqi targets. Yugoslavia was a major operation with most of the attacks being by air. We still maintain large forces there. Haiti was next, with an invasion and overturning of the then government, while Somalia was a short-term fiasco and Sudan and Afghanistan limited to long range attacks with a few cruise missiles.

All these occurred during a large-scale downsizing of the military. But our military obeyed orders and fought as well as they were permitted by their political leaders.

Our military today is very diverse, but becoming less so. There are still liberals, Democrats, non-Christians in the US military. But let's face facts. The liberals and Democrats are becoming more and more open about their distaste, distrust and even hatred for military people.

I am not talking here about just the fringe elements, the Kos Kids and Democratic Underground types, the ten percent of any large group that is off-the-charts nuts on one topic or another.

But when major figures in the party, Senators and Congressmen like Murtha, are willing to slander the military and are not called down, but rather egged on by their peers, then I worry.

The military is tending towards conservatism, Christianity, and patriotism, all three objects of distrust and scorn for modern Democrats. Is the day coming when the military will become less and less willing to fight for a president whose party hates them?

No political system is set in stone. Evolution is a constant in human affairs. I can easily envision a time when the military and the Republican party become in effect a single entity with civilian and military wings, with the Democrats and the civil service in opposition.

Now, I am a Christian, a patriot, a conservative and tend to vote Republican. I am also a traditionalist. The idea of the US military taking in interest in civilian political affairs is frightening.

The Democrats are playing with fire here. I can only hope that some new faces will appear in the party, men and women who will reject the anti-military posturing and return Democrats to a healthy relationship with our armed forces.

But I am not betting on it.

What works in New York

A thing that I don't like about some Democrats is that they seem to have no sensitivity to people who are different from themselves. As an example, take gun control. Democrats seem to want to put the types of controls common to large cities controlled by Democrats into place across the country.

Now, gun control may be fine for New York or Chicago, where the people average a standard deviation lower than rural folk on intelligence tests (I made that up, but I suspect it to be true) and where nearly half of high school students fail to graduate. But should the same laws be enforced against people from small town North Dakota, where nearly every kid succeeds in graduating, crime is practically non-existent, and the only cop may be a deputy sheriff stationed 40 miles away?

It may be that the citizens of Chicago are so badly self-controlled that the only option is to disarm them as completely as possible. But crime is so rare in the town I live in that a single assault last spring is still being discussed. All the guns around here don't seem to cause the trouble they do in Chicago.

But the Democrats of this state, year after year, come up with gun control bills that would replicate throughout the state the same laws that are in place in Chicago.

Well, we are not Chicago people. We don't live like that. We don't think like that. And we don't like it when people different from ourselves, with no empathy, ignorant of how we live, try to force us to be just like them.

Live and let live, eh? Be tolerant of those different from yourself. Pass all the laws you like in your own town, but keep your hands to yourself. Don't try to tell your neighbor how to live his life.