Patsies Are Us

Boring damned people. All over the earth.
Propagating more boring damned people.
What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them
--Charles Bukowski

 In a mad world only the mad are sane
--Akira Kurosawa
 ________________________

 One likes to imagine institutions like the military have a file for "lessons learned", yet here we are approaching the 100th anniversary of WW I and the 72nd anniversary of the United States' entry into WW II, and what did we learn?

Today in the China Sea somewhere, the Chinese and Japanese have a controversy over a newly-declared air defense zone, and the U.S. military is sending its planes in defying China's request for notification. We should be mindful of the reasons we fought the Japs. Of course now the Japanese are our friends and protected by a treaty binding us to their defense.

And in Europe, the U.S. is bound to assist those nations by virtue of its membership in NATO. But why are we committed to the defense of places like Slovakia, Croatia, and all of those other non-essential states to the defense of the USA? Why do we care about defending other people -- especially when things are not exactly normal here in the U.S.?

Before agreeing to defend others on the other side of the world, should we not sort out the divisiveness here at home: over health care, domestic spying on our citizens, unemployment, hunger, education, infrastructure, pollution and petro addiction? How about our prison ovecrowding and the excessive criminalization of sectors of our society? Before we commit to defending Japan shouldn't we first tame our national budget?

Why rattle sabres when you cannot afford to draw them?

If we learned anything from World Wars I & II it is that entangling alliances and subsequent treaties do not prevent wars, but rather ensure that wars escalate as allies are drawn in rather than being kept to regional conflagrations. Why not return to a posture of neutrality in international relations as we lack the power to force our will upon the world?

The U.S. should not be wasting its precious resources fighting other people's fights, and then rebuilding them when they are done. They wouldn't do it for us.