We're doing it again?

There is not a military solution to every problem.

Nor is there a U.S. answer to every problem. Indeed, sometimes U.S. involvement complicates problems.

Yet time and time again, the U.S. has plunged in around the world to use force as a first resort. Strategies like economic sanctions and regional solutions have been more or less abandoned because the United States is always intruding its military into difficult situations.

In researching this editorial, we noticed something interesting about Nevada’s own U.S. senator, Harry Reid. We were unable to find an instance, during his service in the House or the Senate, in which Reid opposed the use of force by presidents in a dozen different international disputes. As a member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, he co-sponsored the Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolution in 1983. In 1991 as a senator, he voted for war in Kuwait, when the Senate came within three votes of stopping that war before it started. In April 2007, long after the Iraq war was clearly shown to be a fiasco and after Reid himself turned against it, he still said he would have voted for it. He had too easily accepted the notion that George W. Bush was telling the truth when Bush asked Congress to approve that war. Now he is too easily accepting the notion that Barack Obama is telling the truth—and accepting the idea that only the United States is a remedy for what is happening in Syria.

People born since World War II have lived through innumerable wars in which the United States was involved. Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, on and on. There are only 206 countries in the world, but there are hundreds of U.S. military bases in 150 of those countries.

Last week the nation was marking the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, with its memorable speech by Martin Luther King Jr. It was King who once explained his opposition to the Vietnam War by saying, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

Not many of our citizens would be willing to accept that characterization of our government, given the fact that our schools do a lousy job of teaching us our history. Few of us know of the 40-year horror imposed by the United States on the people of Guatemala, for instance. A bit better known is our displacement of the reform government of Iran and its replacement by the fascist Reza Pahlavi, sentencing the people of that unfortunate nation to a quarter century of torture, tyranny and death.

U.S. Nobel laureate George Wald once said, “The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed. … There is an entire semantics ready to deal with [our policies]. It involves such phrases as ’those are the facts of life.’ No—these are the facts of death.”

The United States government is not the entity the world looks to when it comes to avoiding war. Neither should the people of the United States.