SHOULD ONLY VETERANS BE ELIGIBLE FOR PUBLIC OFFICE?

The most fatuous proposal (so far) for ending the war in Libya has come from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA.  We should get a warrant for Libyan dictator Muammar Ghadafy from the International Criminal Court, and "go in and arrest him," Ms. Feinstein told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC.

Sen. Feinstein opposes putting in U.S. ground troops.  So who does she imagine would serve the warrant?

The US Military ended conscription ("the draft") 28 years ago, moving to an All Volunteer Force that has proved so vastly superior to that it would be insane to go back.  But in this life, there is a downside to everything.

When we had a draft, most of our political leaders got some military experience.  The number of veterans in Congress has fallen by two thirds since the end of the draft in 1973, says the Military Officers Association of America.

Thus the only thing clear about our policy in Libya is that it’s being made by people who haven’t a clue about what works and what doesn’t in war.  This would be hilarious if the potential consequences weren’t so tragic.

The only upside to the Libyan muddle is that it’s causing Americans to think harder about when we should employ military force.

Just about everyone thinks we should retaliate after we’ve been attacked, as we were by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and by Al Qaeda on 9/11.

And most Americans think we should come to the aid of an ally who is attacked, as President Truman did in Korea in 1950.  Especially when our own national security is threatened, as it was then.

Most Americans think we ought to provide at least moral, and perhaps material support to people who are struggling against dictators.  But many think we should use military force only when our own strategic interests are threatened.

I’ve no objection to military interventions primarily for humanitarian reasons — provided the risks are low, the tragedy to be averted significant.  I suspect Bill Clinton is sorry he didn’t intervene in Rwanda in 1994, when Hutus hacked to death some 800,000 Tutsis.

But humanitarian interventions haven’t worked out well for us.  Perhaps Mr. Clinton was reluctant to intervene in Rwanda because the year before, our humanitarian intervention in Somalia ended so badly, as Mark Bowden recounted in his book "Blackhawk Down."

Most of our recent military troubles stem from well intentioned, but poorly thought out efforts to win hearts and minds. 

Consider Afghanistan.  We obtained our military objectives there — ousting the Taliban government and closing Al Qaeda’s training camps — in a few months, with little cost in blood or treasure. 

But then we began an effort to build a Western-style democracy in "a tribal society run by pederasts whose main industry is growing poppies," as John Hinderaker of Power Line unkindly but accurately describes the place. The cost has been enormous, and we appear farther from success now than when we began.

Most of us have forgotten it took only about three weeks to force regime change in Iraq.  But once we’d ousted Saddam Hussein, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, wanted to install an Iraqi favorable to our interests in the presidential palace, and withdraw.

We can’t know what would have happened if Secretary Rumsfeld had gotten his way.  Iraq could have descended into civil war. (It did anyway.)  Iran could have exerted control.  However, if we had withdrawn our troops when Mr. Rumsfeld wanted to, our troops would have been free to deal with Iran, whose nuclear program is by far the greatest threat in the Middle East.

That said, because Iraq is strategically critical in ways Afghanistan is not, I still believe, nervously, that our efforts to build democracy there were worthwhile

We’ve still got tens of thousands troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now engaged militarily in a third country in which the current Secretary of Defense says we have no strategic interest.  Our troops have been performing magnificently.  Their political masters have not.

In his popular science fiction novel "Starship Troopers," Robert Heinlein, a former naval officer, envisioned a society in which only veterans were eligible to hold public office.  He may have been on to something.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.