Britain won't be joining and huge majorities of Americans oppose it. It doesn't matter

[Douglas Carpenter]

Saturday, Aug 31, 2013 02:22 AM +1000

No one wants it, but we’ll have a little war anyway

By Alex Pareene for salon.com


Credit: AP/Abdullah Al-yassin)

Barack Obama is president now because he opposed a war, from the start. I imagine Ed Miliband knows this. I think he also knows that his Labour colleague Tony Blair is among the most reviled people in Great Britain, a nation that really knows how to revile. So Miliband, the leader of the U.K. opposition, blocked a vote in the House of Commons on using military force against Syria, enraging Prime Minister David Cameron and likely pleasing the majority of Britons who are opposed to action.

I don’t think there’s any doubt that if this were the 1990s, the entire Western community (Western Europe and us) would already be bombing by now, likely without much public or political outcry. But the Iraq nightmare, from the cooked intelligence to the shifting rationales to the horrific occupation to the inevitable slinking away in defeat, ruined the whole game. It’s a lot harder now to pretend that dropping bombs on far-off lands can ever be neat, “surgical” and strictly “humanitarian.” (And dear U.K. Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, this is not helping your case much.) Now the U.K.’s out, and if (when) the U.S. and France go at it, it will likely be without the approval of the United States Congress. (Though you never know, Congress can usually be brought around to supporting a war. The Senate mostly loves the idea already. It’s just a question of whether the White House wants to bother waiting for a vote.)

The antiwar left has some small reason to be grateful for Blair and Bush, for making the citizens of two countries much more dovish, to the point that even a “limited” missile strike campaign is politically toxic. Whether you support a campaign or not, what the president is planning is vastly different, in its scope and its goal, from Iraq. But Americans don’t care. They’re just done. But opposition to war, like support for soaking the rich, is one of those widely popular policies that seldom trickle up to elite elected officials. Our antiwar president (who was never actually antiwar, we all know this, right?) is leading the current charge. It’s not hard to imagine that a Prime Minister Miliband, as opposed to an opposition leader Miliband, would be right there with him.

Right now liberals (and the political press) are letting people like Rand Paul meet the demand for America to have a less “muscular” foreign presence. (This isn’t really surprising: Liberal antiwar voices are pretty much always marginalized in the United States, by both hawkish Democrats and the press,) The right-wing interventionists are terrified at how much his position resonates with people. But I’d put money on the next presidential election involving two supporters of military action against Syria.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/30/no_one_wants_it_but_well_have_a_little_war_anyway/

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