Are we afraid of diplomacy?

All this chatter about Senator Obama displaying "weakness" for advocating a policy of diplomacy over military strikes has me questioning our nation's apparent aversion to talking through our differences with other leaders. It seems as though a large chunk of the electorate favors the "shoot first, talk never" approach offered by Senators McCain and Clinton (and President Bush), but where does this mindset come from?

It can't be an historical lesson, since, if anything, history has proven that diplomacy is almost always more effective than warfare in settling differences. After all, it was diplomacy that ended the Cold War, brought down the Berlin Wall, freed the Iranian hostages (okay, one could argue that money freed the hostages), established the nation of Israel, dismantled the Soviet Union, and on and on (and on).

On the other hand, warfare has proven to be virtually universally disastrous as a means to achieving a meaningful resolution of conflict. One cannot ignore when President Kennedy (presumably in an effort to shake the "weak liberal" label he had been saddled with) committed the monumentally stupid blunder known to us as the "Bay of Pigs" assault, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and then the Cold War. For more current proof of the "war will solve our problems" fallacy, we need only to examine the situation in the Middle East. Our war with Iraq has freed Iran from attention, allowing it to amass an arsenal of weapons far greater than we ever (erroneously) thought Iraq possessed. North Korea has been a constant nuclear threat, proving that the Korean conflict did little to dissuade them from taking on the world.

I remember a number of years ago reading on a feminist website that an excess of testosterone was to blame for our overly-aggressive tendencies, and I agreed with the logic of the assertion. But why, then, does Senator Clinton propose that we wait until Iran attacks Israel and then "obliterate" them? Feminists have long made it their goal to elect a female president to prove that cooler heads could prevail, yet the first woman to have a legitimate chance of winning the presidency has abandoned her femininity and adopted all the worst behaviors of men.

Is it purely biological conditioning, then, that leads us to war over discussion? After all, the survival instinct, from a biological perspective, is purely physical? (Adrenaline gives us the "fight or flight" rush, not the "fight, flight, or share a cup of tea" rush.)

Or is the motivation for war something more sinister, at least on the part of our leaders? After all, they know that nothing gets the flags waving, the banners hanging, the ribbons displayed like a good, old-fashioned butt kicking. This is why, even when we're not at war, we're declaring war on issues at home. Notice how we have wars on drugs, poverty, cancer, crime, guns, etc? As George Carlin once pointed out, war is the "only metaphor in our public discourse for things we don't like". Everything we want to change, we declare war on. "We don't do anything about it; we just declare war on it." It just doesn't whip people into a frenzy when we declare a "round table discussion" against something, so from a public relations perspective, this whole war fervor makes sense.

But why do we confuse war with problem solving when, as we've already seen, the two are seldom related? And worse, why do leaders like Sens. McCain and Clinton seem to argue that talking through our differences with foreign leaders somehow empties the options box? Do they really believe that, if diplomacy fails, Senator Obama wouldn't go to war to defend us or an ally? We all understand that sometimes there is a peace that is to be found only on the other side of war, but some of our leaders argue that war necessarily leads to peace, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.

This evident cluelessness leads me to ask: Just who is the more naive? The man who believes diplomacy can prevent war, or the one who believes war should prevent diplomacy?

No real answers here, just things to ponder.