America’s politicians have a problem with creativity. All too often they can’t—or, more accurately, won’t—think outside the box to figure out policy solutions that will actually advance freedom, peace, and prosperity.
Videos By Rare
Think about it. How should we fix America’s $17 trillion debt problem? Well, if you listen to the voices in DC, the answer is somewhere between “Tax more” and “Increase the rate of spending just a little bit slower than we’d originally planned.”
How should we deal with unsustainable entitlement spending? The political establishment’s plans seem to waver between “Make people wait a couple more years to retire” and “Just ignore it and hope it goes away.”
Or what about the invasive, unconstitutional spying of the NSA? Many of our supposed representatives in Congress are at best willing to give this anti-liberty agency a little slap on the wrist, while others actually applaud its trampling of our civil liberties.
And then there’s ISIS, the terrorist organization advancing through parts of Iraq and Syria. The question of how to deal with ISIS has typified perhaps more than any other issue in recent memory the complete unwillingness of our government and media to think outside the box.
The range of ideas for how to respond to ISIS which we’ve seen out of Washington is remarkably small—so small in fact, that Congress hasn’t bothered to get together to actually discuss it, preferring to shirk this constitutional duty in the hopes of a more comfortable margin of victory on Election Day.
(Indeed, if there’s ever an election to throw the bums out, it’s this one: This is a Congress which refuses to discuss and vote on something as serious as war to preserve their own political careers, which is a blatant smack in the face to the 78 percent of Americans who want to see this vote happen. But I digress.)
And the traditional media has almost unquestioningly accepted Washington’s narrative of inevitable war at the behest of an imperial president. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Leslie Gelb recently noted, those who offer a noninterventionist or otherwise more cautious perspective on war are simply not given an audience by the media. “People dismiss you,” Gelb explained, “You don’t get asked to testify on the Hill. You don’t get asked on most television shows.”
Meanwhile, hysterical hawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain are a steady feature of the news cycle. And this arrangement suits the bipartisan establishment just fine. As Henry Kissinger put it in a September episode of Face the Nation, he quite prefers it when the public is only presented with a single viewpoint:
I would anyway prefer it if both parties had a comparable policy in that respect and disagreed mostly on tactics. We shouldn’t tell the American people that there’s one — that there are two absolute solutions.
We shouldn’t tell the American people that there might be more than one policy solution to a problem as significant as ISIS? Seriously?!
Of course, for those who have followed the career of Ron Paul, the former congressman from Texas whose 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns shook up the whole Republican Party, this disinterest in real debate is very familiar.
Paul was famously met with a hostile reaction when he suggested during a 2008 presidential debate that aggressive, reckless foreign policy frequently has bad consequences. In 2012, he was booed at another debate for proposing that treating people in other countries the way we’d like to be treated just might make us more peaceful and secure. That all sounds pretty prescient now, but at the time, Paul was roundly ridiculed for daring to offer a foreign policy perspective which didn’t fit neatly into the pre-established political narrative.
More recently, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly was similarly mocked for proposing a private mercenary force be used to combat ISIS without dragging the United States into a renewed war in Iraq. Maybe O’Reilly’s plan wasn’t the best idea ever—though it’s actually sort of similar to a suggestion Paul has made for dealing with terrorists—but at least he contributed a new idea. That may be faint praise, but it’s far more kudos than I can offer the United States Congress on this topic.
Ultimately, the key point to remember here is that while ISIS is undoubtedly scary, it’s not an existential threat to America. That’s a good thing for many reasons, but one in particular: It means we don’t have to allow ourselves to be rushed into yet another endless, unconstitutional, expensive, and misguided war.
It means we don’t have to let fearmongering politicians shrink the range of options for dealing with this issue to “Lots of bombs” and “Maybe, like, a couple less bombs.”
And it also means that if our current Congress isn’t up to the task of telling the American people that there’s more than one policy solution to ISIS, maybe we should get ourselves a new Congress this November 4.
Of course, I’m sure D.C. thinks that option is way too out of the box.