Max Boot thinks that health care reform is bad for national security. He suspects that health care reform will wind up costing more than we think, thus accelerating the trend away from defense spending and toward social welfare spending. If we aren't careful, he warns, we'll go the way of socialist, pacifist Europe. And if the U.S. is no longer a great power, who will patrol the sea lanes and kill the terrorists?
I think it's a rather weak argument to say, "We can't do anything about the uninsured today because forty years from now we might be too broke to fight a war in the Taiwan Straights." What if we hadn't enacted Medicare in 1965 on the off chance that forty years hence we'd need to issue war bonds to fight the Soviet Union? Not only would the elderly have suffered, the decision in retrospect would have looked profoundly foolish. Forty years after Medicare, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
The trend from guns to butter is undeniable, and it's a good thing.
The reason why both our Navy and our defense spending have shrunk so is that the threats to U.S. national security are minimal compared to the past. 100 guys hiding in caves in central Asia aren't a more formidable foe than the Wehrmacht or the Red Army.
But Boot's sadness about such good news gives you a good look into the right wing mindset. War heroes and Horatio Alger stories are what make America great, they think. They fear a future of peace and equity whose absence of testing and trial will soften the national character--like "soft" Europe. Never mind that Boot and his ilk are as far removed from actual hunger or combat as the snootiest Sorbonne leftist. "Suffering is good!" Especially when it's other Americans who are suffering.
If I wanted to use a three dollar theological term, I'd say that the Neocons have ontologized evil. But since I don't, I'll say that they espouse a Colonel Flagg theology:
Flagg: One guy decides he's not gonna fight anymore, it catches on, and pretty soon you know what we've got?
B.J.: Peace?
Flagg:If it wasn’t for war, you wouldn’t know what peace was!
Actually it's the other way around. I'm an Augustinian on this one, not a Flaggian. Evil it not necessary for anything, nor does it have any substance of its own. Evil is nothing more than a lack of the good. What we call war is really the lack of peace, sickness--an absence of good health, hate--a deprivation of love. God makes all things, even evil things, work together for good, but neither God nor we need anything evil to overcome in order to develop character or civilization.
John Adams famously said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
A world of all butter and no guns ought not alarm Boot. That's what our ancestors hoped for us to have. And that's what we should work and pray for for our descendants--a world that doesn't need "great powers" or a "globocop." Such a world is probably not right around the corner, absent divine intervention, but the vision of such a world ought to be the star by which we sail, not blood-red Mars.
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