Things are not going well, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told a Hartford paper.
Perhaps Murphy should bone up on his Carl von
Clausewitz, the Prussian general and military theorist who wrote in his seminal
work On War (Vom Kriege) that "War is the continuation of politics by other
means." Clausewitz meant that war serves as a political instrument that
secures the objectives of diplomacy when peaceful measures fail. The political
goal, however, must always guide the conduct and intensity of military action.
When President Ronald Reagan was asked what goal he
would pursue with the Soviet Union during his presidency, Reagan answered, “We
win, they lose.”
Clausewitz was not simply theorizing. He was stating
an incontrovertible historical fact. Diplomacy with Germany and Japan at the
conclusion of World War II was much easier than it had been prior to the
winning of the war. So it has been throughout history, as Murphy might say,
Period!
“Trump has created a disaster for the whole world
that he can’t solve,” Murphy told the Hartford Courant. “The only way the
Strait [of Hormuz] will open is for the war to end. Period. Stop. There is no
way for the U.S. military to reopen that strait. It is an abomination that he
[Trump] is threatening war crimes in order to force Iran to open the Strait… We
all woke up on Easter morning to the president threatening to commit war
crimes: bombing bridges and roads and power plants as a means to try to force
Iran to reopen the Strait. I just don’t think we’ve ever seen this kind of
foreign policy malpractice in our country’s recent history. He’s got to end the
war.”
We all know war is Hell. Perhaps the most
significant campaign during the American Civil War was Union General William
Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, during which about 60,000 Union soldiers
marched from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, covering about 285 miles. The
purpose of the campaign was to induce the civilian population to abandon the
Confederate cause by destroying military targets, infrastructure, and civilian
properties along the way, resulting in a swath of destruction approximately 60
miles wide. Sherman's strategy was to demonstrate that the Confederate
government could not protect its citizens from Union forces, according to History editors.
If war itself is a crime, then Trump certainly has
committed a crime in engaging Iran in a war. We do not yet know whether Trump
will be successful in his goal of opening the Strait of Hormuz so that the
shipping of oil may continue unobstructed by whoever has been left in charge of
the war-shattered “republic.” Buyers and sellers of oil who have in the past
moved their cargo unobstructed through the straight may disagree with Murphy,
despite his assurance that “there is no way for the US military to reopen that
strait.”
As journalists sometimes say, “We’ll see.” It would
be political folly to cede ownership of a free waterway to a militant state that
has for forty seven years managed successfully to declare itself the enemy of
Western culture.
Wednesday’s top of the front page spread in the Hartford
Courant should prove
embarrassing to Murphy, one of President Donald Trump’s more vituperative
critics, although U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, pushing for yet another Trump
impeachment should Democrats reclaim the U.S. House, is a close runner-up.
National Democrats are fully aware 1) that the only punishment for an impeachment finding in the U.S. House is
removal from office, 2) that Trump will not retain office beyond the completion
of his second term, 3) that the punishment therefore will be redundant, and 4)
that any future impeachment proceeding is necessary for campaign reasons alone.
Democrats have been through this tortuous business two times already and,
according to “No Kings” furiosos, King Trump has not yet been dislodged from
the presidency.
A story on
the right of the front page of the Hartford Courant contains a subtitle – “Senator
[Murphy] says president [Trump] has created ‘disaster for the whole world’ as
vital strait [of Hormuz] remains closed” – while a companion story to the left
blares –“After warning that ‘whole civilization will die’ president [Trump]
pulls back, offers 2-week ceasefire.”
Murphy’s “world disaster,” it is apparent, has been
remediated – in one day,
possibly the shortest “world disaster” in world history.
The senator’s wildly wagging tongue has outrun his
brain, a problem not limited to campaign intensity. Soren Kierkegaard somewhere
mentions a common theme in fairytales in which a giant in pursuit of the
princess finds himself far in front of her. Such is the nature of any
thoughtless political ambition that has forsworn forethought and afterthought,
Prometheus and Epimetheus, the Greek gods who stand as sentinels of rationality
and good sense.
Even Murphy’s most ardent admirers will have
difficulty swallowing the notion that Iran, left unmolested, will abandon its
foreign policy ambitions of forty-seven years -- to crush and humiliate Big
Satan, the United States, and Little Satan, Israel. Thus far, these unholy
ambitions have been thwarted.
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