COLUMN: Some More of What I Think...I Think

Image by Cokaigne via Flickr

By Tobin Barnes
Last time I made some outlandish statements--holy cow!--about the War on Terror, knowing absolutely nothing about it other than what I’ve seen in the media. And, boy, what a swamp the media can be—hardly a bedrock from which to form opinions.

Nevertheless, I figured I could take a few random shots in the dark as well as the other idiots we hear from all the time, so I launched with the preposterous idea that we should fight the War on Terror from outside these Muslim third-world countries rather than in them.

If any of my readers actually comprehended this weird foreign policy knuckleball, I’d be surprised. But I did promise to explain myself this time, so here goes:

History has shown that sending forces into somebody else’s country necessarily creates a mean, nasty, ugly mess. The only times it has worked is where there’s a definable front line or when the native population overwhelmingly supports the incursion.

The definable front line of our major wars has worked because the good guys were here and the bad guys were over there. That allowed our forces to focus their resources on the nut that needed to be cracked.

The other times that being in someone else’s country has worked was when the native population fully understood that what they had before our entry was a rotten situation, and anything, including a foreign power, would be better to provide stability and protection. Post-World War II Germany and Haiti are good examples of that.

Most other cases of being in someone else’s country has turned out to be, at best, an undesirable experience—even when there’s been some degree of success. People—red, green, blue or purple—don’t like having other people, armed to the teeth, driving through their neighborhoods.

I guess people are funny that way. They genetically hate having people of another color, race, creed, nation, or planet tromping around on their patch of ground, and understandably so. Who doesn’t want friendly separation, even amongst family members.

So whatever the intentions, putting our people into another country is to be avoided at all costs. The moment a boot hits the ground, you’ve got antagonism at the very least—no matter how many soccer balls you hand out to the children.

Therefore we need to fight these who-knows-when-we’ve-won type of wars from a position of strength outside the borders, not inside the borders where we’re trying to figure out the nuances of foreign cultures on the fly and dodging the latest innovations in sabotage.

People, no matter what century they’re living in, have to figure out their own problems. So let them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply a healthy dose of carrots and/or sticks—hopefully, a lot of carrots and relatively few sticks.

I’m not talking about isolationism here. We have no choice but to be involved in world affairs--that’s a given--as disagreeable as it may sometimes be.

What I’m talking about is freedom for the people of the inevitable trouble spots in the world and us. We can solve our problems, and we can take well-conceived and directed action when others are infringing upon our rights, but we can’t solve other people’s problems. They need the freedom and time to do it themselves.

On the other hand, we need the freedom to avoid having our hands tied with other cultures’ idiosyncrasies.

So if there’s a festering trouble spot in the world that’s adversely affecting us, clamp down on them, but from the outside. Surgically pull our people out of the area, cut off relations, cut off trade, and seize their assets, including ships and planes anywhere we have the power to take hold of them.

Quarantine them until they themselves come to their senses and rejoin the world community. And one-time enemies do gradually, if unevenly, come to their senses when left to their own devices. Look at the Soviet Bloc and now look at Less-Communist China.

But please don’t send our brave young men and women into other people’s countries to awesomely kick behinds, naively educate the people into our better way of life, and then beneficently rebuild them using borrowed money. It’s not appreciated by anyone and it doesn’t work.

But…but…but, you’re thinking.

Oh, sure, I have some more “splaining” to do. I realize that, but maybe next time. After all, this column is called “Off the Wall.”