the outcome of the election

[Occhidiangela]

Hi,
We do not have the 'leadership' to lead the world into a Pax Americana.  We re-elected those who, in less than a year, pissed away a generation of international good will building topped by the rebound from 9/11.  Do we have the ruthlessness to drive the world to it?  Do we have the political will and national toughness to line the Appian way with crosses at ten foot intervals?  Or to shoot Sepoys from guns?  Or to plaster live people into pillars?  Or to take any of the other courses that the big dogs of the past used to enforce their 'paxes'?  And will spreading our values with the whip preserve them?

I look into our past and peer into our future and understand Burns better.

--Pete
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The so called "Pax Americana" was inheirited from Ronald Reagan's closing of the deal with the USSR< and it did not last very long. One can well argue that the Desert Storm chapter of American tanks in Iraq signalled either an end to the Pax Americana or the beginning of it, depending on where you want to go with the next stage of discussion. The attempt at propagating what George Bush, the elder, called the New World Order, one that he envisioned as having a significantly increased and effective role played by the UN, fizzled in failure.

That dream died in the US Congress thanks to a powerful strain of "we really don't want to be the Policeman of the world" in the "neo Jacksonian" contingent of American political thought. Between Somalia and the Balkans, the UN showed its limitations, in its present form, as a collective security organization. (I again am stealing unashamedly from Meade's Special Providence regarding the Jacksonian element.) If ya want something right, as it were, ya gotta do it yourself, or at the least you have to get your hands dirty and work at it, be it via force, persuasion, or both.

The irony is not lost on me that the same vox populi that so rejected the UN's increased role has supported a world's policeman, or Persian Gulf's policeman perhaps, role for the United States.

Why?

The Ostriches got hit on their backsides, and decided to get their heads out of the sand for a while. Funny, they then endorsed a bit of policing that looks suspiciously like what they were kvetching about a few years back. WHere were these folks when I was floating off of Beirut in 1984? Nowhere. Where were they when I was flying surveillance missions near the Southern Philippines in the early 1990's? Nowhere. Where were they when . . . never mind, I am just gettting myself riled up.

Core difference beyond the obvious Twin Towers bit?

Control.

When American blood is going to be shed, "we the people" and the Congress in particular are extremely jealous about being the ones making the decision, and not dumping it on the sensibilities of "a bunch of foreigners in New York." There's some Constitutional baseline to that, funnily enough, and makes an American sort of sense. I will point out that in Afghanistan today, the non Americans who operate there do so under a VERY DIFFERENT set of RoE, one that renders many of their contributions virtually ineffective when the bullets are flying, as they still do, because of a likeminded and completely understandable line of thought regarding their own expeditionary forces. We are a lot more alike to our European allies than not in matters of how our military arms exercise political action. We are all jealous of how, when, and where our blood and treasure gets employed and deployed.

The dual key Rules of Engagement in UNPROFOR in Bosnia are all the evidence I need for that sentiment to make sense, the French RoE in Afghanistan when I was "over there" more of the same.

The cock up in Somalia was a self inflicted wound -- either American political party could have presided over the "do more with less" attitude that asked 5,000+ Army soldiers to do the job that 20,000 Marines had embarked upon. If you look at the rhetoric of the time, the UN and the Turkish General on site took far too much blame for that mess, when the root cause was wishful thinking, ill considered policy decisions, and a few military pure errors.

Pax Americana? If it was other than chimerical, it was a brief, dusty moment.

If you inferred that I meant that we are in the midst of continuing a, or the, Pax Americana then I blame muddy prose and lack of that all important last edit before hitting the post button.

We are in a belli, not a pax. When it started is the topic for another time, and a bit more caffeine.

Occhi