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'Small' wars eat away at national integrity

WASHINGTON - What "wonderful" news this week, as we rock, rattle and roll into election season.

The Russians have started bombing in Syria again. The Sunni Muslims are slaughtering the Shiite Muslims, and vice-versa, across the Middle East. The Saudi Arabians went south for the winter, destroying the heck out of little Yemen. The supposedly "destabilized" Taliban is making a comeback in Afghanistan. And the Turks, the Kurds and the ISIS Sunnis are bombing one another ferociously - again.

Oh yes, the Pentagon and President Obama have half-sheepishly admitting they wasted $500 million-plus on finding "moderate Syrians" to fight ISIS.

Then, without a day being wasted, Washington air dropped 50 tons of small arms ammunition and grenades to other Syrian opposition groups. (As one gentleman once remarked of a friend being married for the third time: "It's the triumph of hope over experience.")

And finally, of course, we come to the most recent horrors: The Turks are bombing the Turkish Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds are going to declare independence, and the Syrian Kurds seem to be fighting both the Syrian government and the Turkish one.

Before we continue on this theme, it is necessary to understand that the aforementioned $500 million did not come out of the red, white and blue - it was your tax money.

Now, it behooves us - and it also demands of us, as citizens of the "greatest power on Earth," not to speak of the only truly "exceptional" nation - to ask one question that arises out of all of this destructive and often savage to-and-froing on the battlefield. It is a question that one seldom hears in the presidential campaign:

Why are we in all of this? So far from home, so truly foreign to our genuine interests, so destructive of our morals and values? Again.

Let's back up for just a minute and look at our beloved country historically:

Columbus Day was just observed on our calendar, if not in all American hearts, and it marked the day that Christopher Columbus discovered the "New World." It was, indeed, beautifully new to Europeans.

Moreover, it was blessed, by God or by the waves or both, with being enclosed and protected in the arms of two great oceans. It was truly exceptional in that our country's Protestant Christian founders imposed upon the new nation-to-come the imprint of parliamentary democratic government and a nascent capitalist economy that they brought from England and Scotland.

Most important, in order to protect and nurture this wonder, the founders insisted that, outside of the Western Hemisphere, America must neither tinker with nor toy in foreign conflicts. Gen. George Washington himself warned in his final presidential address of the peril of foreign entanglements and of involvement in what he saw as persistent European meddling.

"The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave," he proclaimed in his modest, clear and forceful language.

Despite anomalies such as the 1898 wars in Cuba and the Philippines, this view has stuck in the American memory. We hesitated stubbornly before getting involved in both World War I and II (although the CIA and Marines have constantly involved themselves in the Western Hemisphere, the outcomes being equally disastrous in both English and Spanish).

When Americans complain about "decline" today, or about "disintegration" of the old ideals, you can almost always trace the problem back to our strange willingness to replace European colonialists all over the globe, beginning with the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ending (if only!) today with Iraq and Afghanistan.

WHY are we doing this? In every case, from Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the Near East, these supposedly "small wars" have, one by one, drawn us into the entanglements Washington warned against and ravaged our young soldiers as well as foreign lands.

At the same time, America's former reputation as an exceptional nation that existed outside and above the clan hatreds of the past has been all but destroyed.

And largely because of the personal ambitions of those men to be Caesars, instead of Caretakers, on their watches.

The presidential candidates occasionally question these days who voted to go into Iraq. But pointing fingers is not enough. Above all, we need a president who will assure us that this destructive period of our national life will end, before our great reputation in the world does.

• Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years.

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