Pentagon Strategy Aims to Block Internal Threats to Foreign Forces<\/a>”, by Bradley Graham, in this morning’s Washington Post) that it is advised that our foreign policy be to choose leaders of foreign nations, to stabilize those leaders we determine to be good actors, and to eliminate internal threats to those leaders, and to do that through the Pentagon<\/I>. Not through the State Department, but through the military. Now, we could argue back and forth about whether those tactics are (a) useful, (2) ethical, and (iii) already in place, but it seems to me absolutely clear that in anything approximating the America I am part of, such things would be run by civilians. The whole genius of Mr. Madison’s magnificent constitution is deciding who<\/I> runs what<\/I>. OK, not the whole genius, but most of it. And the whole idea of having foreign policy run out of the Pentagon (and that is what is being proposed) is screwing with the most basic parts of that.\nWell, you say, but seriously, is there a bright line being crossed here? Maybe not. Maybe it’s an arbitrary limit I’m imagining here. But think about it this way: if you were writing a novel about how the US fell to a tyranny, where the ruling class used the military to enforce its power (and, by the way, reduced the status of most women to mothers-of-soldiers), how would you push us down that slope? What sorts of people would you invent to be put in charge of what, and how would they manipulate public opinion to accept, piecemeal, an abandonment of those constitutional principles and the social constructs they give rise to that tie the hands of the powerful? How would the first thirty years look like between now and Starship Troopers<\/I>?\n“Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak focusing on international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” -Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense<\/blockquote>\nchazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n
No, I have to say that again: “international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.”\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gentle Readers will be aware that Your Humble Blogger is generally pretty serene about the political big picture, and although I feel that Our Only President is doing a lot of harm in this country and the world, I try…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17343,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions\/17343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}