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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBritain won't be joining and huge majorities of Americans oppose it. It doesn't matter
Saturday, Aug 31, 2013 02:22 AM +1000
No one wants it, but well have a little war anyway
By Alex Pareene for salon.com
Credit: AP/Abdullah Al-yassin)
Barack Obama is president now because he opposed a war, from the start. I imagine Ed Miliband knows this. I think he also knows that his Labour colleague Tony Blair is among the most reviled people in Great Britain, a nation that really knows how to revile. So Miliband, the leader of the U.K. opposition, blocked a vote in the House of Commons on using military force against Syria, enraging Prime Minister David Cameron and likely pleasing the majority of Britons who are opposed to action.
I dont think theres any doubt that if this were the 1990s, the entire Western community (Western Europe and us) would already be bombing by now, likely without much public or political outcry. But the Iraq nightmare, from the cooked intelligence to the shifting rationales to the horrific occupation to the inevitable slinking away in defeat, ruined the whole game. Its a lot harder now to pretend that dropping bombs on far-off lands can ever be neat, surgical and strictly humanitarian. (And dear U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, this is not helping your case much.) Now the U.K.s out, and if (when) the U.S. and France go at it, it will likely be without the approval of the United States Congress. (Though you never know, Congress can usually be brought around to supporting a war. The Senate mostly loves the idea already. Its just a question of whether the White House wants to bother waiting for a vote.)
The antiwar left has some small reason to be grateful for Blair and Bush, for making the citizens of two countries much more dovish, to the point that even a limited missile strike campaign is politically toxic. Whether you support a campaign or not, what the president is planning is vastly different, in its scope and its goal, from Iraq. But Americans dont care. Theyre just done. But opposition to war, like support for soaking the rich, is one of those widely popular policies that seldom trickle up to elite elected officials. Our antiwar president (who was never actually antiwar, we all know this, right?) is leading the current charge. Its not hard to imagine that a Prime Minister Miliband, as opposed to an opposition leader Miliband, would be right there with him.
Right now liberals (and the political press) are letting people like Rand Paul meet the demand for America to have a less muscular foreign presence. (This isnt really surprising: Liberal antiwar voices are pretty much always marginalized in the United States, by both hawkish Democrats and the press,) The right-wing interventionists are terrified at how much his position resonates with people. But Id put money on the next presidential election involving two supporters of military action against Syria.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/30/no_one_wants_it_but_well_have_a_little_war_anyway/
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