I Cannot Keep Up

 I literally cannot keep up with the insanity that is the Donald Trump presidency. There are so many issues, there are so many crazy pronouncements, there are so many deviations from reality that I don't even know what to focus on. Who would have imagined that possible nuclear war with North Korea isn't the top headline this morning? But let's backtrack a bit and look at the war-mongering.

Who can deny that the Kims have always been provocative? Who can deny that they have frequently made threats against the United States? Starting with grand-daddy Kim Il-Sung, continuing with daddy Kim-Jong-Il and now with Kim-Jong-Un, they have always seemed to us to be cartoon villains. The North Korean leaders have not done much to convince the world that they aren't a bunch of tough-talking, but impotent, tin pot dictators. It's also pretty evident that North Korea has always been intent on arming itself with nuclear weapons. Every diplomatic overture by the United States, as well as intervention by Russia, China and the United Nations has ended with North Korea cancelling any agreements. But all the bellicose talk by the Kims over the years has been little more than talk. North Korea, like the little guy on the playground mouthing off to the captain of the football team, has always counted on United States restraint. They knew that there was a close to zero chance that the United States would launch a first strike, so they felt emboldened to run their mouths. And the United States has always acted with restraint. Again, like the captain of the football team who knew there wasn't much of an upside to beating up the mouthy little kid, we knew that muzzling North Korea wasn't worth another war. But in light of our president's remarks this past week, can North Korea still be assured of our restraint? Can they be assured that we won't attack first? A backed-into-a-corner North Korea that suspects that it might get nuked if it doesn't act first seems to me a dangerous option. And what if our hair-trigger-temper president decides that he will launch a preemptive strike? China has already indicated that it will defend North Korea if we attack first. Are we prepared for that?

And just when we all started checking the news first thing in the morning to make sure nuclear weapons haven't been launched, Trump says that military intervention in Venezuela is a possible option. What? Where did that come from? Granted, Venezuela is a mess right now. President Nicholas Maduro is in the midst of a power grab that is eliminating all vestiges of democracy, there are riots and starvation. So what's the plan? Who, exactly, would we go in to support? Our record of nation building and democratic support is pretty poor lately. This, from the guy who seems to actually like dictators, and has said publicly that we will not be imposing our values on other countries or telling them how to conduct their affairs. Why? Venezuela is very, very close.

I'm not a reflexive pacifist. Not in my personal life and not in my politics. Sometimes the military has to be sent in to defend our nation. However, I have seen very little in the last few years that has justified military intervention. We went into Iraq because we cherry-picked intelligence reports. We stayed there and in Afghanistan because the mission kept changing and we had no clear defined goal, nothing that we could point to and say "if we accomplish this we're going home, we won". We got involved on the periphery in Libya and Syria and helped unleash chaos. We're back in Iraq supporting anti-Islamic State forces, although some of the groups we support are fighting each other.

Into this mess we now have a president who wants us to get involved in two more wars, one because their leader says mean things and the other because it's close.

I'm a strong proponent of civilian oversight and control of the military. I wasn't in favor of the Department of Defense being run by a former general, or two other generals being top advisors, that's what the Joint Chiefs of Staff are for. But if we're going to have all these generals hanging around, maybe the president should listen to what they have to say and moderate is tone a bit before we're all enguylfed in fire and fury.