Political Realities, Personal Solutions

Even limited wars in history require total focus, commitment and national mobilization. The expected failure of Iraqi politicians to meet the political benchmarks, or fail to unify beyond them, will seal the doom of Iraq as political entity. In the end, a political deal of the greatest scope and impact is required. Even barring success of the Iraqis, the clock on US capability to sustain the effort is over without severe national moral and material damage.

The responsibility for the war in Iraq and the political/military problems of the Persian Gulf region (nuclear proliferation in Iran, conventional arms sales, Salafi ideology and transnational terrorism) has been abandoned by the Bush Administration. There have been clear White House and Congressional statements and flagrant hints that resolution of these matters will be up to the next president after January 2009. Even more disturbing, leading presidential candidates, spin pundits, and respected strategic forecasters believe the “contradictions in reality” between war and peace will last for decades, not excluding a US military presence for possibly 50 or 100 years.

Can the American people find any of this acceptable? National leaders admit their moral defeat and then try removing a verdict of their guilt from the historical record. That is not statesmanship.

A fully-informed American public needs to start seeing that the US national political system has personal political profit and class division as a higher aim than a satisfied public interest; that the politics of war and peace have been abused and manipulated by partisanship and profit; that America’s men and women have measured their fatal patriotism against the abuses of national interest by the fears and greed of the political class. The next 5 years might be a time of opportunity to settle some accounts and reorganize the entire international and domestic political and economic system. If as Richard Nixon said in his last book in the early 1990s, if we “seize the moment,” the future can belong to the people, not leaders, of the world, for liberty, freedom, justice, and equality.

The American public holds the key. US citizens deny their own the moral shortcomings of ignorance and apathy in politics and economics, especially international politics and US foreign policy. Citizens disconnect themselves from their ultimate responsibility for choosing poorly and not holding their political leaders fully-accountable. The ignorance and apathy must end. The solutions to all of America’s foreign issues, and looming domestic social and economic challenges, are all found in local communities, through the awareness and activism of normal people with jobs and families. What this implies involves the public’s contribution to solving not only Iraq but domestic and world itself. The solution, however, requires a peaceful revolution in American education and culture to bring positive, peaceful change.

Reason and wisdom must come back to forefront of the US national security policy. When wars have no grand political strategy as an aim toward which wars are waged, and when the cost of lives and financial investment have unlimited blank checks, political leaders of poor ability and limited vision escalate small wars easily fought and won and expand them beyond the means of
a nation’s capability to win the peace. Those poor leaders abandon a political grand strategy of calculated risk of limited and achievable goals and replace it with a policy of total war and extermination. This course leads inevitably to legal political and paramilitary terrorism, against the innocent and one’s own law-abiding fellow citizesn.

To avoid an unending war in the Middle East a way must be sought to end it on a semi-permanent basis, no matter how difficult, unfair, unjust, or unpopular to others and ourselves. This requires the sacrifice of pleasure and advantages of everyone, including Americans. If people do work together along this path to peace, America and the world are doomed to fascism. The course of escalation and extermination is almost always chosen by enraged party partisan demagogues. They use “Big Lies,” accusations, personal attacks, propaganda disguised as public relations, political push polls, scapegoats, and the lives of other people’s children to hide their moral crimes, those crimes almost always involving fear and greed of the political class.

Victory in war and a peace that lasts afterwards require a type of political animal almost extinct in America: The unselfish statesmen who uses “brute moral clarity” to lead his or her country’s citizens in the struggle to serve the national interest AND international stability. The truly effective leaders, like Washington, Disraeli, Bismarck, FDR, Churchill, Eisenhower, and de Gaulle, all clearly understood the political goals toward which they aimed their policies in war and the peace at home and abroad which followed. They were not afraid to fight for the future of liberty and freedom in order to triumph over the enemies of peace and humanity.

They succeeded in seeing clearly what was at stake for their nation’s, sacrificing party or selfish goals, and uniting people behind a crisp vision of the real issues. Because great leaders understood the problems, their strategies in war ultimately followed a line of logic to the peaceful order that would satisfy the national interests, but also make reasonable friends of enemies. It is only a failure of morals and intelligence, and the grip of fear and greed, that compels a country to use conflict, violence, and war as ends in themselves. Democracy cannot be lasting when the child of war of aggression to create it. Like a revolution, “war liberty” will eat its children in fear, terror and paranoia.

The American public in elections for every national office must demand much better from candidates and those who win elections. They can and should, for the sake of survival, hold leaders accountable by informed action on the part of the average citizen to place national leaders in office of wisdom, experience, skill, toughness, shrewdness, and “realism.” The US has tried the military solution in Middle East, Horn of Africa and Central Asia for 30 years now. Disguised failure in Iraq, no matter how spun, is not a 1 year, 5 year or 17 year (Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991) crisis of foreign policy decision-making. Indeed, the problems of US policy in the arc of conflict in the Indian Ocean Area (IOA) reaches back past the time of Vietnam and even before World War II.

Leaders should be chosen along the following criteria. Whether a Presidential candidate, or Congresspersons or Senators, they must pursue a creative and radical bartering of the entire political/military-economic order of the Indian Ocean Area The most dangerous instability plaguing the the US and the great powers occurs within what is here termed the Indian Ocean Area. The 19th Century-style of Great Power diplomacy, and perhaps limited coercion, is needed to solve all these problems and the solution must start in Iraq and among its neighbors.

From Egypt in the west of the IOA, to Southern Africa, east to Australia, north to Peking and to Moscow, and back to Turkey and to Israel, no region of the world poses greater danger to the US national interest in the next 100 years than the Indian Ocean Area. This is one quarter of the globe, rich in resources and troubles. The conflicts burning in the region threaten the use of nuclear weapons that could kill hundreds of millions if not a billion of average family-loving people. A world cultural conflict out of control would also destroy the world economy. The problems must be explored with more honesty for at their root is some psychology in every nation of fear and greed. The options to create a stable peace and true unity among all powers to solve, and not foster, more war, division, death and destruction must be looked at realistically. So far, every leader in the world has failed this test of morality in the 21st Century.

It takes decisive action following informed awareness to bring about an age of liberty for all and prosperity for families. The solution lies in humanity’s instinct for survival and the real spirtual desire for fellowship and peace. These are not utopian dreams. Wars, but smaller wars, will still happen. But a US-led policy initiative based on individual liberty, economic opportunity, the common safety of all peoples (regardless of color or culture, including religion), with cooperative, community-based action, is the long-term solution.

Which Presidential candidates have the guts, the intelligence, the strength and the toughness to lead the world and America toward the future of liberty and freedom, peace and humanity? NONE OF THEM, perhaps. Somehow, someway, the American people’s ignorance and apathy is responsible for that. So what can be done? Perhaps individuals need to take more interest and responsibility to work for peace. Even after November 2008, the process of peaceful positive change in the minds and spirits, the regard and action, of average people cannot go back to the idle pleasures of a nation ignorantly teetering over the edge of a fall into unending militarism, silent dictatorship, and material and spiritual poverty.

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