Will There Be War?

Considering the continued murkiness of the facts and evidence, I don’t believe this nation should elect to war based primarily on a ‘prime time’ Presidential monologue. A serious and comprehensive national dialogue is required. If I were to ask the President some questions they would be -

1.    If violence is the answer to our grievance, why wouldn’t violence be the answer to someone else’s grievances a month from now or a year from now? Or is this war projected to be the war to end all grievances?

2.    If we bomb them, why shouldn’t we expect to be bombed? Americans have coasted too long on the anomaly of WWII and our recent conflicts where we engage in war and all the death and destruction happens “over there”. But war is not just us ‘doing them’; it is also them ‘doing us’. That’s war! And if bombs go off in their cities, we must expect they will go off in ours; exploded under the same construction of “justice” that supposedly informs our actions. Unless the President, in asking for authorization to go to war, is prepared to place this real possibility before the people, to make the people understand and appreciate the real consequences of war; that we must expect to see the blood of our children flowing down the storm drains in our streets, then his request would be less than his full moral duty. It would be an omission closely related to deception.

But there are other aspects equally pertinent to our national security and domestic tranquility to consider. We are not only debating a foreign war, we are debating a class war.

Over the course of the past weeks, right up to today, there haven’t been any other or new arguments presented differing from those generated on ‘day one’. No new evidence or proof has surfaced to sway adopted opinions. All of the originally held, various, and respective speculations are intact, in place, and unchanged. And the entire population is exposed to the same corporate media.  But I submit for consideration my admittedly unscientific conclusion derived from anecdotal evidence and my personal interpretation of the polls, that it appears that the economic top ten percent of the society is for the war, and the bottom 90% is against it. Why this is the case is another debate for another time. But “IF” I am correct I don’t believe it is possible for the President to lay out a case, lacking some as yet un-communicated, overwhelmingly compelling and believable arguments and proven facts that may have only emerged in the past hours, to change this calculus. So, although it is another discomfort in an uncomfortable and complex situation for a serially embattled president, a choice must be made. The President not only has a military decision to make, he has a political decision to make as well. His most vital and meaningful decision in this scenario doesn’t involve which weapons systems to employ, designating high value targets, or proving to the world how much of a badass he can be. What will have the greatest impact on our security and domestic tranquility is his decision on which constituency to appease. The historic and social trajectory of our nation awaits his choice.