Why Are We In Vietnam?



Granted, pocketbook issues and a looming recession have distracted most Americans from properly regarding the minutiae of what is actually going on on the ground in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan. And, granted, The Surge (tm) -- and a new and more effective and less elf-involved SecDef -- is significantly reducing combat deaths.

But if the opium-heroin crop in Aghanistan is at a record haul (thus financing the Taliaban), and iif Iraqi women have to wear headscarves or face death then we have to ask ourselves: 1) Are we going to take a hard line and make it a military objective to destroy all poppy fields? 2) Are we going to be more realistic and wise and instead collectively buy the poppies, undercutting the market rate for the opium, and use it, say, for medicinal uses in the Third World (And imagine how much soft power cheap morphine for doctors in Third World countries would buy), 3) Are we willing to adjust our definition of "Freedom" in Iraq, and allow for some tyrannical rule, like the backwards treatment of women and headscarves. 4) And Can we really go to sleep at night knowing that we liberated Iraq from Sadaam for these tyrannies against women to take their place?

Wouldn't it have been so much better if we had just used the international goodwill following September 11th to take the leadership reins of the United Nations -- through hard and soft power, and the sheer logic of our major contributions to Turtle Bay (22% or $1.42 per American citizen)-- and used the levers of it's institutions to prosecute the war for us? Terrorism -- believe it or not -- is against International Law. Imagine terrorists answering for their crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague instead of at our disgusting, filthy Guantanamo Bay, which is antithetical to the spirit of the American consitution.

Imagine, say, if we took a leadership role on the Law of the Seas Committee. It is presently a basketcase of pandemonium, a riot of disharmony, because no single nation sees it in their self-interest to exert their will over the cacophany of the briny deep. It is, they will argue, lazily (but always in a gruff, hyper-masculine John Wayne-ish voice), in the best interest of everyone to have open seas, outside of, say, a modest 8 mile coastal buffer zone.

No nation, to be sure, wants to contribute treasure of the lives of their citizenry to police the oceans beyond their immediate self-interests. Why should they when all is quiet on the western shores? "It's naive," they will say, between swigs of bad brandy, with all the subtlety and elan of a wildebeast in heat (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

The terrorists, of course, thrive on this psychology. The selfishness of a decadent West, fractured, and concerned only with its own immediate self-interests allows Al Quaeda to operate at the margins, with the slavers, the pirates, the drug dealers and the arms salesmen. And there, at the margins, they bide their time, manufacturing a black wind.

There is presently no univeraly recognized, efficiently policed law of the sea. International criminals operate at will on perceived weaknesses at any nation's border or port. And, sadly, there never will be a uniform law of the sea treaty recognized by the United Nations and policed by the West until a major terrorist attack occurs. It is indeed tragic that we come together internationally only in the face of a grave global threat.

As a result of this stupid, hilbilly, New York Sun logic: pirates roam the seas, as do terrorists and international cartels that deal in slaves and contraband by way of the ungoverned sea. And so because of the laziness and base reptile-brain impulses of provincial nativism -- which Republicans foment, especially on tribal issues like immigration and xenophobia against race-mixing -- these dark, boiling forces thrive in an environment of international lawlessness.

No single power exerts muscular strength over the agenda of the United Nations. Republicans tend to patronize it. They favor small, ad hoc, temporary multilateral organizations, like NATO. China plays the Imperialism card with the Third World to gain soft power over the Third World (and access to oil fields), as they grown, in 20 years or so, into a World Power. Russia now exists to thwart the United States because of the Bush Administrations astonishingly stupid misreading of Putin's outer limits in what he would tolerate in his back yard of Eastern Europe.

And it is in chaos that Al Quaeda thrives.