Bush’s folly: adopting transcendental global aims, while shrinking the military

Mark Helprin, one of the tiny minority of mainstream conservatives who is not a yes-man to President Bush, seems to have some special dispensation whereby the Wall Street Journal gives him free reign to attack the president’s disastrously inadequate policies in the war on terror. The main idea of his current article is that the U.S. has unnecessarily and foolishly shrunk its military establishment way below what is needed to cope with our challenges: “The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of [WWII levels of spending] and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000.” All our military planning and distribution of our forces, particularly the inadequate numbers used in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, have been a function of this reduced military. Our inadequate defense forces not only encourage terrorists, but leave an opening to the expanding threat of China. Here are some excerpts from the article:

… The instant the Arab world realized that the promised shock and awe had not materialized, the insurgency was born.

We then nurtured it by deploying a fraction of the ratio (10:1) long experience indicates is necessary for suppression; by dismissing the enemy as mere “thugs,” when, although they are thugs and worse, they have the thousand-year motivation of their civilization defending its heartland from Persians, Mongols, Shiites, and now Christians; and by gratuitously elevating our aims from the purely defensive to the transcendental, while steadily diluting the little power we have in the hope of forcing the entire Arab and Muslim worlds to a new politics. From a country where they have been held down in their beleaguered enclaves for two-and-a-half years, how are 140,000 soldiers to transform the highly aggressive and deeply rooted political cultures of 1.2 billion people?…

The war in Iraq has been poorly planned and executed from the beginning, and now, like a hurricane over warm water, the insurgency is in a position to take immense energy from the fundamental divisions in that nation. The rise of Chinese military power, although lately noted, has met with no response. America’s borders are open, its cities vulnerable, its civil defense nonexistent, its armies stretched thin. We have taken only deeply inadequate steps to prepare for and forestall a viral pandemic that by the testimony of experts is a high probability and could kill scores of millions in this country alone. That we do not see relatively simple and necessary courses of action, and are not led and inspired to them, represents a catastrophic failure of leadership that bridges party lines.

Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation’s presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 09, 2005 10:03 AM | Send