But it wasn't always this way.
There was a time where the preferred action to international trouble or instability wasn't simply to "hit them so hard and so often that every time they hear a propeller on a plane or a jet aircraft engine that they urinate down both legs." In fact, there was once a time where the sound of American propellers was actually greeted with joy and jubilation in countries we had only recently stopped bombing. From 1948-1949, American planes, formerly engines of war, were converted into support vessels to air-drop much needed supplies into a city that had fallen behind Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain. It was called the Berlin Airlift, and it was part of a larger idea known as the Marshall plan, named after then-Secretary of State George Marshall. Starting in 1948, the United States gave $13 billion dollars in order to help rebuild the Europe that had just barely survived a catastrophic conflict. To put that number in context, the USA's GDP in 1948 was $258 billion. We gave food, supplies, and money to help rebuild Europe after spending billions before to decimate it... but why?
Because people like George Marshall understood that if we do not support our newly vanquished foes, they will only grow to resent us, and take up arms against us in the future. It was a lesson learned by the awful agreements that ended the Great War, World War I, only 30 years prior, that had plunged Germany into a spiral of hatred that led to the rise of Hitler himself. The United States had the foresight to understand that not everyone in Germany was a Nazi, or a murderer, and that if we work to win their hearts and minds with building instead of bombs, with food instead of fire, we can prevent the next war and, in fact, bring Europe back from the brink instead of plunging it into chaos, as we saw in the dreadfully mismanaged and underfunded world behind Stalin's curtain.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their products for currencies the continuing value of which is not open to question.Would that we had that same foresight now.
~George Marshall, at Harvard, June 5 1947
The doctrine now is the Bush Doctrine, now seemingly perplexingly adopted by Barack Obama. Bomb them first, bomb them second, and bomb them last. It's a swaggering sort of bravado only seen by those who have never seen the battle, and do not possess the empathy that tells of forgiving your enemies. The overwhelming military might championed by what Eisenhower warned as a military industrial complex following World War II has done nothing to improve relations or, arguably, to win us any engagement following 1945. We fought to a stalemate in Korea, we defoliated Vietnam, and we've blasted away at brushfire wars ever since with little to no success. We ruined Iraq by bombing it with no reason or forethought, and now our prescription to combat the festering wounds of our own mistakes is simply to tear the stitches open again. Perhaps, before another blunder commences in the Middle East, we should look to the past and understand that sometimes it is better not to bomb... or, at least, when the bombing is over, not to threaten to bomb again.
There is a terrific story out of the Berlin Airlift that is so perfect only History could have made it so: Gail Halvorsen, forever known as the Candy Bomber. Halvorsen, a C-54 pilot, chatted with some German youth behind a barbed wire fence after one of his humanitarian drops, and they asked him if he had gum or candy to give. Halvorsen then promised the children he would bring them gum and candy on his next flight in, and would "wiggle his wings" so they children would know which one was him. As the legend of "Uncle Wiggly Wings" grew, other pilots wanted to help, candy was donated, and handkerchiefs were even fashioned into tiny parachutes for the candy drops. When asked about whether or not he was essentially bribing the children, as Soviet officials behind the blockade had complained, Halvorsen's response was simple:
"Kids are kids everywhere."
In this time of war mania and blind hatred, I think America needs a few more candy bombers and a few more kind souls wishing to help rather than to hurt. Does it really take a horrible, nearly cataclysmic war for such kindness to grow out of the ashes? Do we really have to go farther in this madness to come back from the brink, or can't we simply learn from the lessons of History this time and, instead of marshaling the troops for combat, why don't we Marshall the troops for peace?
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup
