The Maddow Doctrine: We Need to Make War Hard Again

[babylonsister]

The Maddow Doctrine: We Need to Make War Hard Again

—By Kevin Drum
| Wed Apr. 11, 2012 11:14 AM PDT


I finished reading Rachel Maddow's Drift a couple of days ago, and right off the bat I want to say that I'm glad she wrote it. Too many books from TV talking heads are just tired rehashes of whatever the issue of the moment happens to be, barely worth cracking open unless you've spent the past year vacationing on Mars. But Drift is different: it's about a topic that isn't especially sexy right now, and definitely doesn't get enough attention. With Iraq winding down, the economy still sluggish, and domestic politics dominating the headline, Maddow decided to write a book about America and the way we use our military. Specifically: why is it so damn easy to go to war these days?

It's a good question, and it's unfortunate that it's regularly trivialized by mountains of snark. This is Maddow's stock in trade, of course, and I guess you have to expect a certain amount of it. But this is a more thoughtful book than it sometimes lets on, and the snark too often obscures that. It also, I suspect, makes the book off-putting for anyone who's not already a fan.

If you can get past that, though, there's a deadly serious argument here that deserves way more attention than it gets. The book is, basically, a series of potted histories that explain how we drifted away from our post-Vietnam promise to make sure we never again went to war without the full backing and buy-in of the American public. Maddow's premise is that, just as the founders intended, our aim was to make war hard. Presidents would need Congress on their side. The Abrams Doctrine ensured that reserves would have to be called up. Wars would no longer unfold almost accidentally, as Vietnam did.

And for a while that was the case. Sure, there was Grenada, but that was a small thing. And the contras in Central America and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. But the real breakdown, Maddow says, started almost accidentally at the end of the Reagan administration, when Attorney General Ed Meese, desperate to defend Reagan's conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal, insisted that the president had the right to ignore congressional restrictions on his warmaking capability. His commander-in-chief powers gave him all the authority he needed to do anything he wanted.

more...

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/maddow-doctrine-we-need-make-war-hard-again

[Faryn Balyncd]

1. A war against an ill-defined tactic is the war-maker's dream, & needs thorough discrediting if we...

...are ever to make going to war hard, as the founder's intended.



We have been intimidated into accepting its legitimacy.

[dhpgetsit]

2. I think the best way to "make war hard again"

Is to impose a hefty war tax on the rich, to make sure all wartime expenses are paid by the rich as quickly as possible.

[Brigid]

3. An idea I once saw on a now-defunct website:

If war is contemplated, the draft should be brought back, and a tax surcharge should be enacted to pay for it. The rich should not be exempt from either; instead they should be first in line for both. We'll see how popular any war is then.