Thus far, the 21st Century has been pretty much of a disappointment. In 2000 George Bush was elected president. Only a half of a year after he took office, the World Trade Center in New York was destroyed. An angry Bush took us into war against al-qaeda in Afganistan and we are still there, thirteen years later. Meanwhile, Bush and his cronies decided that now was the time/excuse to go back into Iraq. One suspects that the younger Bush was eager to show his daddy that he could do a better job. And, of course, what he did was completely de-stabilize Iraq and the whole region. We've only recently gotten out of there, only to return as military "instructors." And now, an incredibly vicious group known as ISIS is taking hold of land in Syria and Iraq in the name of forming an Islamic State. Oh, and should we mention the Russian annexation of parts of Ukraine? Or Israel's devastation of Gaza?
The time frame for all of this is especially amazing when you contrast it with our involvement in World War II. Basically, we entered WWII right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The war ended in the summer of 1945, only four years later. Not only that, but we were really not ready for war in 1941 so it took a year or more of tremendous industrial production and military training to take the country to war. Now-a-days the US is ready for war on a moments notice. In fact, every time there is a disturbance in the world we find ourselves debating whether we should send in our military.
A sad aspect of this situation is that our heavy investment in the military has transformed war. Back in the age of WWI and WWII the people as such had to go to war. Ordinary citizens had to volunteer or were drafted. The economy had to shift to make war instead of butter and bread. People's consumption was limited. In fact, every one sacrificed. In Bush's wars the design was to do the whole thing independent of the people --- no changes in industry, consumption, life as such. It's a volunteer military running on borrowed money. Of course, this ultimately created a major depression but people still ignored what had caused it. My feeling is that, when a nation wants to go to war, it should be something that the people as a whole support and make major sacrifices to conduct. That's the only thing that justifies the human losses.
So now we come down to the "war" against ISIS. Obama is willing to send in our planes and drones but not our soldiers. That's "war" with very little sacrifice. Will it continue that way? I doubt it. What we have been dealing with, this century, is basically a religious war --- 18th Century Islamists versus the whole modern Western world. This is not just a crazed leader like Hitler trying to make up for Germany's humiliating loss of WWI. It is a whole religious movement that can spawn new radical leaders at the drop of a hat. If we had successfully dropped Hitler at some point in the '40s, the war would probably have ended right there. But the fact is we can blow up hundreds of radical Islamic leaders and more will spring from the earth. The sad and disturbing fact is that this war has no end.
