If We Can’t Spell It, We Shouldn’t Bomb It

After every election, naysayers emerge warning that the public initiative process poses great dangers to our constitutional form of government. This is a misperception. California initiatives add a wonderful dose of serendipity to policy-making. Reasoned analysis has created scores of problems, so what is the harm in trying a little irrationality? Obviously the rest of the nation agrees; California propositions have caught on across country almost as fast as the wine cooler.

The trend has only one failing: We’ve never tried applying the initiative process to our most pressing international problems.

As a first step toward bringing foreign policy under popular rule, Proposition XXX is hereby submitted to the California voters with the following ballot summary: “The United States government shall be prohibited henceforth from invading or bombing any nation unless a majority of adult Americans can identify said nation on a map.”

The idea for Proposition XXX was born about a year ago, when the Gallup organization reported a survey of the public’s knowledge of international geography. The findings were conclusive: We are geographicly illiterate. In other words, most Americans could not distinguish between Iran and Iraq on a map unless they’d personally supervised arms shipments there.

Admit it. When you first heard that we were invading Grenada, you wondered what the Spanish government had done wrong. Or was Grenada the latest car being pitched on TV by Ricardo Montalban?

A recent University of Maryland study of college students in teacher-preparation programs confirmed the depth of the problem. Of the prospective elementary school teachers, 71% could not locate France on a map; of the prospective high-school social-studies teachers, 46% could not find Vietnam.

The logic behind Proposition XXX is simple. If we are going to blast a country to kingdom come, we should at least know where it is. As a corollary: Can a nation truly be a threat to our security if we can’t locate it?

This initiative promises to bring U.S. democracy back into our foreign policy. But the practical importance of Proposition XXX cannot be overemphasized. When so many of our international interventions are being conducted by the private initiative of Americans like Eugene Hasenfus, the need is critical for universal geographic literacy. A slight misconception of the map, and Hasenfus might have been delivering military equipment to insurgents in El Salvador rather than Nicaragua. A sobering thought.

There would be benefits to the electoral process as well. Voters tired of the same old arguments about taxes and the death penalty would be energized by discussions of something objective, like the exact location of Burkina Faso.

Predictably, a few extremists have argued that Proposition XXX does not go far enough. They’re lobbying for an amendment stating that before any U.S. military intervention, the majority of adult Americans should also be able to spell the name of the targeted country. But such a requirement would clearly hamper our ability as a nation to protect ourselves. Just because most Americans could never learn how to spell Mauritius doesn’t mean that it should never be bombed.