War Games: Syria & Iran Edition

The past is always a different, better place and never more so than when commentators dip into American history to salvage some justification for their favoured approach to any contemporary policy dilemma. Thus Leon Wieseltier has a point when he suggests Rachel Maddow’s view that “disincentives to war” were “deliberately built into” the “American system of government” is really only proof that “originalism is just the search for a convenient past, a political sport played with key words”. A shame, then, that he buttresses his argument with copious references to Thomas Jefferson! In truth, those disincentives withered with Andrew Jackson.

But how many military interventions can one man countenance at a time? Wieseltier writes that “Trashing force may win you a lot of friends, but it is stupid. There is nothing “artificial” about the primacy of defense because there is nothing artificial about threats and conflicts and atrocities.” Quite so. I must have missed the period when Washington DC was dominated by peaceniks since, in my political memory alone, the United States has used force in Libya (twice), Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Aghanistan and Iraq (twice).