boysfrom

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

International The Boys from Syracuse by Gerry Krownstein In 500 BC, Athens was a rich nation, leader of the Free World and head of the Delian League, a defense pact equivalent to today's NATO. By 450 BC, Athens was broke, and under the domination of Sparta. How could the mightiest and wealthiest nation in the Mediterranean world be transformed in such a short time into a pauper city state under the heel of its traditional enemy. It is as if the US had lost the Cold War and been subjugated by the USSR.

The demise of Athens as "leader of the free world" comes down to a single particularly Greek concept: hubris. Hubris is the kind of overweening pride and arrogance that causes a person to believe that he is exempt from the laws of gods and men; that his actions have no consequences that he cannot foresee and control. When the Athenian Assembly was persuaded by the demagogue Alcibiades to send an expedition to Sicily to conquer Syracuse (a city allied with the Spartan Peloponnesian League) and expand Athenian control of the sea, events were set in motion that led to Athens' downfall. The expedition, and the subsequent breach of the Fifty Year Truce with the Peloponnesian League, united Athens' enemies, alienated her allies, and bankrupted the state. The fleet was broken, and many of the Athenian troops ended their lives as slave laborers in Sicilian mines.

History does not really repeat itself, and past events are not always guides to current behavior. Nevertheless, it can serve as a warning, an indication of things to beware of. Our military, preeminent in the world, is now stretched thin, too thin to accomplish the tasks set it without reinstituting a draft. We have not been successful in capturing, or even locating those we identified as the arch villains in Afghanistan. Outside of the capital, Kabul, we do not have the manpower to stabilize the country and make it whole. In Iraq, where, absent the urgent circumstances we pointed to as justification of our invasion, we committed aggression and violated international law, we have mounting casualties, civil chaos, a Shiite majority turning against us, and a failure to capture Saddam Hussein. Our expenditures for these wars, given the huge tax-cut deficits, are pushing us into bankruptcy, or at the very least preventing us from attending to urgent domestic problems.

Our current Iraq problems and costs were foreseeable; there is a wealth of documentation now available to show that the current situation was predicted as the most likely outcome of our invasion. Rumsfeld and Bush, the Boys from Syracuse, putting politics and ideology ahead of truth, suppressed these warnings and bulled ahead with their plans. Now they whine that the nations they disdained in the run-up to the invasion are not kicking in with money and manpower to help us out of the hole the Administration actions dug. Unlike the Athenians, we have certainly not been defeated militarily, but it has put in jeopardy our policy of relying on Reserves and National Guard to supplement a lean core of regular forces. Like the Athenians, however, we have damaged our relationships with important economic and military allies, shaken the confidence of the world in both our competence and our motives, and are in the process of bleeding our economy.

To forestall an Athenian outcome, we must fire Rumsfeld and the coterie of neo-con non-warriors driving our foreign and defense policies, admit our errors and give our allies and the UN a meaningful say in the reconstruction of Iraq, and concentrate on strengthening our economy at all levels, not just the top. Refraining from solo foreign adventures, which may kill Bush's reelection strategy, is number one on the list of what we must do to preserve our country.