Look Forward In Order To Win

We remember “A Choice, Not An Echo” or “Shining City on a Hill” as rallying cries that moved first a movement and then a nation and then the world. They were forward looking affirmations of confidence and faith in freedom and American resolve. We don’t remember any such rallying cries from Gerald Ford, Bush #41 or 43, but rather pleas for staying the course of whatever course we were on. They won or lost largely for reasons external to their own efforts, but they failed to set a course that would either last or overcome.

Leadership includes but is far more than “the buck stops here.” Leadership is the wisdom and experience to weld others’ concerns and aspirations with a vision and the concrete steps to get there, then to mobilize to achieve each step.

It’s equally true that every war contains both the seeds of the next war and the next peace. How we act heavily influences which. There is no end of history, or sidestepping history. The challenges will never disappear of living in an evolving world of many nations and peoples, often with conflicting claims. Those challenges are best met constructively and bravely. Otherwise, temporary avoidance seeds or leaves the field to those to gain from conflict.

We look back at watersheds of history, some at the time seeing the portents from the failures that only appeared manifest to many later on, too late. World War I put Europe into shocked impotence and the U.S. into isolationism, exploited by communist and fascist thugs. World War II only turned this around late in the game by the resistance of England, survival instinct of Russians, and the U.S. taking years to get fully mobilized. Sheltered by a nuclear standoff, Western Europe returned to shocked impotence and the U.S. to carrying the burdens of internationalism on an accountant’s cost-benefit mentality. In Vietnam, the time bought for others in the region and our failing determination shifted our leaders to finding the costs exceeding our own benefits, leaving the residual costs to others who suffered from encouraged foes and later to ourselves as new foes took encouragement from our fickle timidity.

Today, we find relatively few disagreeing that we’re in a long war of some sort with a determined, distributed force of extremists. Otherwise, there’s little agreement, either among or between various camps of thought. Much of that chaotic thinking stems from our prior confusions, errors, and failures to face or correct them.

Most of those are rooted in budgetary unwillingness to maintain large adaptive armed forces, and an unwillingness to awake earlier to these needs and the needs for early overwhelming action.

Expressions of dangerous purposes that threaten our security and well-being do not energize us in majority efforts. Then, the armed threats are rationalized away or haltingly met by half-measures that fail to squelch the encouraged foes. When finally moved to action, our forces are inadequate and misallocated, and the disappointments and excess blood shed discourage many.

If we’d had better intelligence, if it hadn’t been denuded of experienced minds and made overly dependent on eyes in the sky by the post-Vietnam restrictions, maybe we would have known or done differently in 2003. If we had a larger and more flexible armed force budgeted at prior levels, a more robust Special Operations capability, and State and other departments more focused on counterinsurgency than canapés, if the military hadn’t been shrunk to semi-adequacy by so-called “peace dividend” domestic spending and the other departments had stepped up to their partnership responsibilities, maybe we would have done better after Saddam was toppled.

We can continue to argue those points. But, to dwell on them in a domestic-centered tit-for-tat is an avoidance of facing up to the future. Whether we today or soon withdraw from or send more troops to Iraq, we will still face the same problems and needs.

Further denuding our capacities to analyze, act and respond, as post-Vietnam, will not meet those problems and needs.

Only a major – and costly, but still less than the ‘50’s or ‘60’s spending as a percent of GNP – expansion and reorganization of our intelligence and military and foreign operations organs, and determined head-knocking to coordinate and work together effectively, will be hopefully adequate.

The candidate for 2008 who is courageous and articulate to thus lead may win, but certainly will be seen as looking forward and set a course for the future rather than wallowing in the past.

We don’t need, or want, a rehash of the past, or near-sighted stubbornness to stay the course. We need, and are awaiting, a new course. Most Americans will rally to those who come together to lead, rather than belittle and be little. We need a “Forward Vision for a Free World.”