There are some ideas in this article that I agree with, but it lays a foundation of argument that I believe is corrupt.
It is right and proper to debate the pros and cons of present day situations that have the potential to escalate into future shooting conflicts. North Korea, for instance; or Iran. There is value in ventilating all the ramifications, all the options available to us, all the possible outcomes, good and bad. All that and more has value, and can lead to better decisions.
But there is a fundamental flaw in articles like this one which renders it useless, even propaganda. That is that after the fact, any prior course of action has already produced its consequences. The unintended and unpredictable and random pathways all human events actually take is already frozen into history. All can clearly see what actually happened.
Then along come people like Johnstone to criticize the choices and policies made by people in the past, who had no knowledge of the future, on the basis of the complainers’ 20/20 view of the actual course of events after the fact.
But it’s even worse. Those people then proceed to tell us that the leaders of the past are responsible for the eventual consequences because they should have predicted them and chosen differently. But of course, the complainers never, ever have to answer for what real consequences would have resulted from their alternate policies and actions that they now proffer as the ones that should instead have been followed, because the real consequences of those alternate choices will never be known. As the complainers spin their story, their alternatives never produce anything but wonderful outcomes, and we all live happily ever after.
We will never know what outcome would have resulted from not using military force at the time. What would have been the outcome of not opposing the Russian instigated invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950? Many people criticize the Korean Police Action on the basis of its consequences, and tell us we should have stood down, but who can tell us what the balancing consequences would have been of standing down?
We can criticize the conduct of any military operation, particularly in the recent Middle East, but who can tell us what the real consequences of their alternative recommendations would have been? Can anyone argue with certainty that the decision not to confront Hitler in 1938 was better than to oppose him directly when he was weak? Johnstone’s thesis of non-intervention was followed in that case; was the outcome preferable?
