Will Syrian Civil War Mark End to American Militarism?

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/02/will-syrian-civil-war-mark-end-to-american-militarism/



Will Syrian Civil War Mark End to American Militarism?
By James Kitfield
on February 04, 2014 at 12:19 PM

When President Barack Obama spoke from the White House last September to rally a war-weary nation behind limited strikes against Syria, the vast power he wielded as commander-in-chief seemed more curse than blessing. The United States was the only nation that could punish and deter a dictator from continuing to slaughter his own people with chemical weapons, Obama argued, even as Congress sought to tie his hands and reject a military option the American public overwhelmingly opposed. So the president who campaigned as the man to get America out of its wars was left to argue that military action made sense when an important principle was at stake.

“What kind of world will we live in if the United States of America sees a dictator brazenly violate international law with poison gas and we choose to look the other way?” Obama asked, stressing at the same time that the United States was not the world’s policeman. “But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes American different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

Call it the curse of the “indispensable nation.” With an unmatched military — the only one with truly global reach — presidents feel constant pressure from political factions, interest groups and close allies alike to right the world’s myriad wrongs using our military for the simple reason that we alone can. That sense of uniqueness also plays to a national psyche nursed on the mother’s milk of ‘American Exceptionalism,’ and a strategic culture that favors decisive action and quick fixes. With new military technologies that can translate the waggle of a joystick in Nevada into an explosion half a world away, the reflex can be even stronger to reach for the hammer in America’s superpower toolbox, and to view international problems as a nail.

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“Today, too many ideologues call for U.S. force as the first option rather than a last resort,” Gates writes. “On the left, we hear about the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians to justify military interventions in Libya, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. On the right, the failure to strike Syria or Iran is deemed an abdication of U.S. leadership. And so the rest of the world sees the U.S. as a militaristic country quick to launch planes, cruise missiles and drones deep into sovereign countries or ungoverned spaces… Our foreign and national security policy has become too militarized, the use of force too easy for presidents.”