Don't Blame the Soldiers

I think that my esteemed colleague has it backwards. We do not have an aggressive foreign policy because we have a large army, we have a large army to support our aggressive foreign policy. If you substantially reduce the size of the military without changing their mission, all you would be doing is setting the military up for failure. First reduce the mission, then reduce the military.

The president is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces. Although the top generals might try to influence him, the president can hire and fire the generals. Congress has the power to declare war, but I don't think they've ever done so except at the request of the president. World war II was the last time that congress actually declared war anyway, what they do now is pass some kind of war powers act, which is essentially the same thing. The president can commit military forces to a limited mission on his own but, as soon as it looks like it's going to turn into a big deal, he has to seek the approval of congress. Nobody asks the soldiers what they think about it.

Funny thing is that U.S. foreign policy doesn't seem to vary that much because of who's currently in the White House. The Vietnam war spanned the administration of four presidents, two of them Democrats and two of them Republicans. Barack Obama ran for election on the promise that he would get us our of Afghanistan and Iraq, but he has continued the wind-down on the same timetable that was proposed by his predecessor. Call me "paranoid" if you want to, but I think that they're all in it together!

I'm not sure what to say about Canada. They have a smaller population than we do, so they probably couldn't field as big an army as we do, even if they wanted to, which I don't think they do. I think they put a higher percentage of their federal budget into social programs than we do and, as far as I know, that's the way most of the Canadians want it. They have supported U.S. military missions in the past, but I've never heard of them initiating one on their own.

Funny thing about Canada, we have more in common with them than any other country, but you never hear anything about them in the news. I don't know if that's because Canada doesn't do anything newsworthy or because somebody over here doesn't want us to know about it when they do. I watch the Weather Channel a lot, and Canada is usually shown as blank territory on the map. A lot of our weather systems come from Canada, but they don't show up on the weather maps until they cross the border. You've got this big glob of a storm system that's chopped off right along the Canadian border. They tell us that it's coming from Canada, but they don't show us what it looks on the other side. It's like the whole thing doesn't exist until it crosses the line. Why do you suppose that is?

P.S. Ken, you double posted your last message. One of the posts was labeled as a draft, but it was just a blank page. Assuming that it was an error, I took the liberty of deleting it.