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Friday, August 17th, the president of Puerto Rico's Senate, Antonio
Fas Alzamora, will visit the United Nations in an attempt to force
the U.S. Navy to cease all training on the island of Vieques immediately.
His visit may
well illuminate the underpinnings of the Vieques controversy more
than he intends. Vieques is a place, after all, where the U.S. Navy
and Marines prepare to land American troops on a hostile shore,
sometimes at the request of the U.N.
The curious
thing in the Vieques debate is how many of the politicians involved
fail to notice the damage an ineffective American military will
do to their globalist dreams. Take for example, New York's junior
senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Hillary has
been demanding an immediate halt to American training on Vieques.
Her husband treated the U.S. military as cannon fodder for every
conceivable U.N. initiative during his presidency. It seemed the
only time either of them thought of American forces is when our
men and women were dispatched to risk their lives as part of some
U.N.-sponsored boondoggle.
This conflict
between grandiose visions of U.N. peacekeeping coupled with miserly
treatment of American troops suggests there is more than a quest
for the Puerto Rican vote at work here.
The debate
over Vieques once again allows the radicals of the 1960's and those
who admired them from afar to demonstrate their hostility to all
things military.
This sort of
fashionable dislike of the military is not new. It served as an
unexpected conclusion for the film, The Caine Mutiny. Military
service during peacetime is unglamorous at best and poorly paid.
There are easier ways to earn public applause.
Thus Robert
Kennedy Jr. names his new son Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy and
is hailed in some quarters for doing something so noble. But the
men and women in our armed forces do something at least as noble
and far more dangerous: they have chosen to undertake strenuous
training to be ready to deter foreign aggression.
Admittedly, in these days of cruise missiles and smart bombs, the
need for American troops to practice beachfront assaults of enemy
territory is not quite as high as it was during World War II. But
America's demonstrated ability to do so transforms the mere appearance
of U.S. warships in a trouble spot into a statement of national
seriousness which has often been enough to prompt peace talks.
Now if the
only places American troops will ever be sent are areas where U.N.
peace negotiations have already settled matters, then the Vieques
training exercises might be unnecessary. But America is likely to
have national interests not always endorsed by the U.N. General
Assembly.
Abandoning
Vieques also risks American lives by requiring our troops to depend
solely on the latest electronic gadgets, Tom Clancy's novels describing
American military techno-wizardry notwithstanding.
Robert Heinlein's
1959 staunchly pro-military novel, Starship
Troopers, makes this point. An infantry recruit, complains:
"if we can use an H-bomb, . . . isn't it kind of ridiculous
to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting
yourself killed?" His sergeant replies:
War is not
violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled
violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your
government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill
the enemy just to be killing him
. . . but to make him do what you want him to do" (emphasis
in original).
Those who see
no use for military training on Vieques would do well to remember
the recent spectacle of American troops prevented from landing on
the coast of Haiti simply because people were standing on shore
yelling at them. The dubious reasons for U.S. involvement in Haiti
notwithstanding, it does America no good to be seen as speaking
loudly while carrying a tiny stick.
Of course,
the ability of our military to do its two jobs: Defending this land
from its enemies and carrying out the decisions of the American
government seems to matter little to the trendy "U.S. out of
Vieques" movement. Perhaps it should.
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