A new budget has been proposed for the American military,
and the hawkish voices of the country are sounding the alarm as usual. And as
always, they are saying there is not enough money in the budget for America to do
all that needs to be done. This is a replay of the contest between guns and
butter, coming this time at a point where America must make a clear choice
between having the guns or the butter because it can no longer have both.
There are many hawkish voices in America , and they tend to
congregate in a number of publications where they publish their thoughts, one
of these being National Review Online. The editor of that publication is Rich
Lowry which makes him the one who chooses who gets published and who gets
rejected. Of course, he makes the decision based on his preferences which he
does not pretend to be dovish. And so, whatever he writes can be taken as
representative of what his hawkish contributors write and appear in the
National Review.
As it happens, Lowry himself wrote an article on that
subject under the title: “Military-Budget Delusion” and the subtitle:
“Democrats oppose defense spending because it's defense; Republicans, because
it's spending,” and had it published on February 25, 2014 in National Review
Online. In it – going by the title and the subtitle – he is supposed to be
telling the readers why a budget that apparently sounds acceptable to both the
Democrats and the Republicans is actually delusional. In addition, what this
means is that he views the entire political class in America as being delusional; a
bunch of hallucinating psychos, that is.
And so, Lowry begins by telling that the budget will “reduce
the U.S. Army to pre–World War II levels.” He goes on to say there is a government
spin accompanying that, which is to the effect that it will be a 21 st-century
kind of smart force. But he laments: “everyone knows” it is something else, and
does not tell who those “everyone” are. Moreover, if they do not include the
delusional Democrats or Republicans, who else may be knowledgeable and
interested enough in such matters to tell him – or maybe whisper in his ear –
that they know otherwise. A mystery that does not get resolved by the end of
the article.
He then does something that is typically Lowry-like. He
plants the seeds at the start of the article – seeds that will clash with
something he will write later, and demolish his entire argument. Look at this:
“570,000 troops were barely enough to fight the Iraq
and Afghanistan
wars, and the budget will take us to 450,000 or even fewer.”
These being wars that dragged for a long time, and where America lost
according to some people or did very badly according to others. Now look what
Lowry does a few paragraphs later: “In 1939, the United States had an army of
185,000 men on the cusp of history's most cataclysmic war.” And that was the
war in which America
scored its most glorious moments. What is Lowry saying here? Let America go down
to 185,000 men? A mystery that does not get resolved by the end of the article.
Staying with the knack of arguing against himself, he now
finds a way to argue against everything he has been saying probably ever since
he started writing. It is that he always said America has been a force for good,
having never done something to be ashamed of. But he has a weakness which is
that he places everyone he heard of in one of two columns, one labeled “good
guys” and one labeled “bad guys.” He often quotes his good guys not realizing
that they are killing arguments he made in the current article or long before
that.
Look now who Rich Lowry is quoting. It is Stephen Ambrose
who wrote this: “It is odd, that a nation that had come into existence through
a victorious war, gained large portions of its territory through war, established
its industrial revolution and national unity through a bloody civil war, and
won a colonial empire through war, could believe that war profited no one.”
That's not exactly a peaceful force for good, is it?
But if America
is good for the world despite being the warring nation that it is, what is
wrong in considering what Lowry suggests would be unthinkable? Here is his
position now: “Unless we outsource patrolling the sea lanes to China and the security of Europe to Russia ...” If
anything, these two nations can only turn out to be as bad as America but not
worse. And that's because nothing can be worse than gaining territory, having a
civil war and a colonial empire through war. That's the ultimate in evil
behavior. What do you think, Rich?