US Military Policy on Patriot’s Day as Containment
April 17, 2017
We now have retired generals in
charge of the Defense Department and the National Security Agency, veterans of
combat and war games strategy, and a Secretary of State who apparently respects
military advice and to synchronize it with political foreign policy. I look on the recent series of military
events—dropping a Mother Of All Bombs on Afghan resistance underground central
command center, bombing a Syrian air base to uselessness, and I join others in
speculating, setting off self-destruct mechanisms in missiles North Koreans
have tried to launch. Each is a case,
two overt and one covert, of a measured signal that—as Vice President Pence put
it yesterday in South Korea—we will take measured means to teach you, or in
Afghanistan’s case force you, to desist.
I can imagine that the Secretary of State carried that message to
President Putin when they recently met, to pass the message that the US held
the Syrian government responsible for all nerve gas attacks, and would take “whatever
measures necessary” to respond to any further gas attacks. And I can’t help thinking that someone,
perhaps even Trump during his recent visit with the Chinese president, has let
North Koreans know that the US with not allow North Koreans to succeed in
launching any missile that could even reach Japan. And voila, the US vice president happens to
visit South Korea just as the North Koreans are celebrating the birthday of Kim
Il-Sung, and the missile no doubt to cap the North Korean’s celebration of
defensive strength went poof. Whatever
covert messages the North Koreans may have received, I imagine they’re aware
that the US government—including a president who by now openly accepts and
respects his newly minted senior military and foreign policy advisers—will officially
stay silent or deny any claims to have destroyed the missiles North Korea goes
to such lengths to launch, and dare the North Koreans to admit they are
militarily so weak.
Whatever gets worked out
diplomatically will be led by Secretary Tillerson, who appears in these early
moments in office to be working in close partnership with his military
counterparts. I’m not a fan of
punishment and violence, but practically speaking, I find myself respecting the
discipline by which today’s US government sets limits on its tolerance, its
containment of violence. Love and peace,
hal
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