FRACTURED NATION:CONFLICTING FORIEGN POLICIES

Our nation seems to be coming apart at the seams. Our hidebound political system, so in need of evolutionary change, is straight jacketed in our excellent (though dated) US Constitution. Our great national document ranks up there with other great watershed political documents of the past, such as the Code of Hammurabbi 1754 BC, Charlemagne's Capitulary laws (802) the Magna Carta (1215) and the Declaration of Independence (1776). Its weakness is that it is near impossible to alter or modify. We are (almost) just stuck with it. Our nation is a militarily and economically powerful, dynamic modern nation of the 21 Century. But we are saddled with a political system codified in our Constitution designed for a small, weak, agricultural nation of the late 18th Century. Our exemplary Founding Fathers could never have imagined what their newly freed thirteen colonies would eventually become. They could not have foreseen the problems or difficulties we face in the 21 st century. Our modern nation's errors, problems and disgraces are out there for all to see. We are a nation with crazy gun laws, the highest incarceration rate in the world, an antiquated, and inhumane death penalty, Gerrymandered election districts, elections awash with cash, and rampant income inequality. The affluent and powerful regularly buy and sell offices, and political favors. Our Supreme Court's Citizen's United Decision released a tidal wave of corporate money into the election system which has only exacerbated an already fraught and dire "money in politics" situation. These and other political "multiple stressors" have acted synergysitcally to degrade our once great "city on a hill" into what many foreign observers (See: The Economist October 2015) hace called a "dysfunctional and fractious" nation.

Besides these problems enumerated above, we are an arrogant and belligerant people, living in a nation armed to the teeth both in our homes and our air, naval and military forces. At home, we shoot to kill more than 30,000 of our own citizens each year with the more than 300 million guns (AK47s, Kalasnikoffs, Glocks) we have stashed in our closests and under our beds. Nationally, our massive military establishment with more than 900 bases spread all around the globe, suupported by a government which spends more than $600-700 billion dollars on it annually. That massive amount of cash is more than the cumilative outlay of almost all the other nations in the world combined. China and Russia, our chief military competitors, have a combined outlay for military assets of only one-fifth (20%) of ours. Like the carpenter who has just acquired a big, new hammer and tends to treat everything before him as if it were a nail (Maslow 1966), our nation seems determined to solve all of our foreign problems by going first for its big powerful military. Our penchant for applying the muzzle of a gun to every and all foreign matters has resulted in the devastation of wide swaths of the Middle East, the expenditure of trillions of USA dollars and the loss of countless lives...both American and foreign civilians.

That gets us to our Syria policy which is just another example of our fractured and conflicting political and policy impulses. These first few days in October since Mr. Putin of Russia began his overt and more robust military support of the Assad regime in Syria we have heard much in the way of complaints, envy, warnings etcetera from Washington. The Prsident is being attacked for doing nothing in Syria, or doing too much in Syria, or letting the Russians outflank and embarrass him.

Our Syria policy is just another example of a governemnt on the verge of political spastic cerebral palsy. President Obama was forced by the neocon holdovers in his government from the Bush years and his political detractors on the far right into "doing something" about Syria. He did so reluctantly. He is smart enough to know well that there is no military solution to the Syria tragedy. But a politically divided Congress dominated by the Republicans, a right leaning presss corps forced him into making a foolish decision. The result? He now finds himself with a conflicted Syria policy in which one hand is covertly working to attack, degrade and undermine the legitimate government of Syria, while the other supports military forces which are armed ostensibly to fight ISIS irregulars but in fact turn their guns on both the ISIS forces and the Assad regime. Wisely reluctant to put American "boots on the ground" Obama has instead taken up an ineffective air and drone campaign agaist the terrorists of ISIS. With no informants in the region to identify targets or ground troops to occupy territory, this aerial campaign to "slowly degrade" the ISIS forces has been a failure.

Our fractious, conflicted, and dysfunctional government prevents Obama from actually explaining to the American public that our bombing campaign is a failure and our covert attacks on the Assad regime only serve to weaken the only forces that have some chance of reuniting Syria and hopefully helping to end the chaos and bloodshed. We all know that there is no military solution. Let's state that plainly and work toward a better solution.

Why not put our efforts into cooperating with Russia and after ISIS and the other insurgents are disarmed and pacified work to bring the disparate forces to the conference table where a peace settlemnt may be hammered out. Can we not be part of the solution rather than part of the problem?