Purple Rain #4

When should the US military get involved in another country? When it is net beneficial to do so.

...Okay enough of the cop-out. You see, this TKO illusrates a basic problem in how some make their decisions. Blindly following a political idealology is always wrong. Always. In debates concerning the military, all too often one or both sides stick to their idealology and refuse to note anything unique to the situation, quite like some conservatives and tax-cuts. Whether the budjet is in surplus or in deficit, and whether the economy is booming or busting, the answer is allways the same: "More tax cuts!". Like for fiscal policy, rational decision-making on areas of the military can not be solely dependent on cute one-liners.

Pasivism, i.e. the "War is never an answer" movement is one of these idealologies. Ian and Marie's post effectivly deconstructs this position; a cogent military theory ought to include cases of self-defence and preventing mass genocide. If taking a life is the most ethically awful thing you can do, an action, even an violent one, that prevents a greater number people from dying is moral. Just because your hands are clean of any death doesn't mean that preventable death does not occur. My younger sister once was caught up in this movement on how violence always causes more violence. So under this pretext, I poked my sister. After all, under the idea of passivism, if she resisted poking me back, I wouldn't poke her back. But this idea doesn't account for the Older Sibling Effect; no matter what the younger sibling does, the older sibling will annoy the younger sibling.

Using the military for every trivial thing is also just as flawed. In March, our campus had the displeasure of bringing in Ann Coulter. Of the people in attendance, I'd say half were liberals who were going just to get pissed off (like me), a third were conservatives, and the remaining sixth were there because Ann was wearing revealing clothes. I think it has to do with how Ann was pitched: "HOT! BLOND! SEXY! And CONSERVATIVE". The phrase "political pornography" seems quite apt here. Say what you want about her, but she is at least honest on where she stands. Ann: "Who cares if the war [in Iraq] was about oil? We need oil!" The trouble with this philosophy is quite apparent. Our troops lose their lives in aggressive military action; our military resources should not be wasted so friviously. Also, there is the idea of opportunity cost; an action taken by troops reduces other opportunities of other things we could be usign the troops for. Using the example of Iraq, it is flawed to determine whether the war was just simply by asking "Are we better with or without Saddam?" (Even though a case can be made that the Arab backlash helped our enemies more than Saddam's fall hurt them). Rather, the question should be whether the war was the best thing to do with our troops.

I'm not trying to imply that these are the only troubled idealologies in discourse. In responce to a libertarian who claimed the market was always better than the government, a using my standard example of national defence showing the need for shared benefits. What I did not expect was him to be consistant and argue that private industry would uphold the national defence much better than the army that feels no market force to do the job right.

Riight. Just try to imagine: Haliburtion declaring war in the Mideast for oil.

Oh wait...