Power's Arrogance and War's Embrace

General McChrystal’s know-it-all arrogance is nothing new in the power game of war.  Headquartered in a far-off land, listening to Yessir, Yessir all day from underlings bucking for promotion, it is no wonder that General Big Shot thought he was smarter than the President, or that he liked seeing his name in print, or that one person playing up to media triggers political jockeying by a lot of people.  It is all part of war’s embrace.

What is new is that war, all war, must no longer be embraced, because it confronts us with the terminal doom of nuclear war.

The Taliban are today’s wartime opponents. For the moment they must be confronted militarily. Longer term strategy, though, must confront them, and everyone, with global law and global law enforcement. A prerequisite for the supremacy of law is submission of all nations to law and law enforcement. That will have to be a gradual, staged process. The order-imposing capacity of Superpower, uncertain and unreliable as it is, can be surrendered only gradually, and only to institutions whose law enforcement capacity, and whose democratic accountability have developed in slow stages. Today’s question is, how to reach the first stage.

The future has grown so perilous that history will judge President Obama by whether he lays the foundation for global law. To preserve civilian control of the world’s greatest military force without further politicizing that  armed force certainly is one requisite. To aspire to international institutions of law and law enforcement requires the capacity to smother international disputes, including terrorism. The second requisite is global democracy evolved far enough to make it safe and therefore feasible to empower the means of law enforcement.

Plans for when and how the United States will withdraw from Afghanistan should accompany parallel plans for peaceful, legal ways to sort out the aspirations and rights of ideological, ethnic, and political sub-groups that challenge national authority, and figuring how to turn enforcement power over them to reliably strong and accountable international institutions. The Taliban is only one such sub-group.

I predict that Obama will do little or nothing to achieve this, because nations as presently composed are incapable of taking steps directed to ultimately reducing their own power. The Superpower of the United States renders this nation especially incapable of doing it. This is why a secure future for the human race depends on some number of individuals accepting the assignment to re-mold the nation system into an international system. Where power remains available to individuals and their NGOs to influence national policies is in the cities and towns of the world.

The nations have targeted urban populations with nuclear missiles, so urban populations are more than entitled, in fact they are obligated for survival, to think their way out of the doomsday box.