Jam It Down Their Throats
I'm having a little dust up with Kevin who is spouting the Libertarian line of "foreign policy with no blowback" (esp. re:Iraq) at the Ron Paul post at Classical Values. I have a word or two for him.
Kevin,
Your #1 mistake is to believe that there are perfect foreign policies with no blowback.
If that was the case then why did the Founders have a War Dept? Wouldn't a State Dept. have been sufficient?
Why did Jefferson attack the Jihadis in his day? Were they attacking the USA?
I was a hard core Libertarian once. Became Secty/Treas of our local club. I've heard it all. 9/11 changed my mind.
It doesn't matter if they have legit grievances or it is all a fantasy in their heads.
Some one in the ME needed the shit kicked out of them. Saddam, who put women and children in mass graves was as good a place to start as any. It has the military advantage of central location so the next sumabitch is an easier target.
It is the way the world actually works. There are still alpha males out there who only know the law of the jungle. A taste of cold steel often sobers them up. If not jam it down their throats.
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9 comments:
Sadly like a lot of 'liberal' libertarians today, your boy Kevin is more than just merely ignorant of history and of those who yell Allah'u Ackbar...
After all what did Kevin think ships like the USS Constitution was built for?
juandos,
From the Constitution link:
Dec. 29 - USS CONSTITUTION is about 30 miles off the coast of Brazil on 29 December 1812 when, at about 2 in the afternoon, she begins a fight with the faster HMS JAVA. Commodore William Bainbridge, now in command of "Old Ironsides," is wounded twice, and the ship's steering wheel is shot away, but for more than 3 hours he maneuvers masterfully and fights tenaciously until, finally, HMS JAVA has no masts left standing and her captain lays dying. This time there are 34 American casualties as opposed to around 130 British. Like HMS GUERRIERE, HMS JAVA is too badly damaged to bring home - but before he sinks her, Bainbridge has her wheel removed to replace the one shot away on USS CONSTITUTION.
I have had the singular honor of serving aboard the USS Bainbridge DLGN-25, the US Navy's only nuclear powered frigate as a reactor operator.
I don't know where you people get the idea that Ron Paul doesn't defend the right to have a Military. He is a Congregationalist. He has said countless times that he believes the US should have a military to DEFEND our country. He is against interfering with other countries battles, intervention and preemptive wars.
I meant constitutionalist, sorry
Anon.,
Dr. Paul, as much as I respect him (he got my vote in '88), understands nothing about alpha male games.
Most Libertarians are like that. I ought to know. I spent 15 years with them.
You hold alpha males in check by making them fear you. The powers at the time did not check the Austrian Corporal. Look what it had earned them. The Corporal himself said that a company of soldiers willing to fight in 1936 would have derailed his whole adventure.
Osama himself said so. Strong horse vs. weak horse.
A little preemption can go a long ways to preventing conflagrations. you wait long enough and the body counts get very high.
Teddy Roosevelt may have been our last President who understood this. One must not only be strong but also appear mercilessly strong. Done correctly it need not cost much in lives or treasure.
I'm sorry, it is not very liberal. It is in fact quite ugly. It is the way the world works.
The idea is to every now and then unpredictably swat a fly with a drop forge.
pour l'encourager les autres
Merely sitting behind your fortifications invites attack. You not only have to have force, but show your willingness to use it. One without the other provides no deterrence.
Call me naive, but is pre-emptive action really a good answer?
In the case of Iraq, I would truly ask you if it was intelligent action? Saddam Hussein might have been a dictator...but there are dozens around the world.
In spite of Mr. Colin Powells Powerpoint Presentation, the reality is that the Iraq war was fought on a lie. It has made the world more unsafe, and Iraq a haven of terrorists and "freedom fighters".
The US is not becoming safer by simply using force. You must ask why there is so much hatred for the nation, coupled with so much admiration? Perhaps a brief visit to a history of US foreign policy over the last 50 years might convince you that the good guys are not always wearing white cowboy hats!
So let me get this straight: we must attack those who do not attack us, so that nations will quake in their boots at the thought of not attacking us ...
hmmm ... that cannot be right ...
we must abandon the pursuit of those who do attack us to invade unrelated countries in the same region so that ...
uhhh ...
Sorry, I guess I don't understand "alpha male games" either. Sure, you respond to force with force. But you don't pick a random victim, you smash the people who attacked you ...
Saddam was no random victim.
Ever since he violated the Kuwait War armistice we were de-facto at war with him. Even Clinton husband and wife recognized that. Husband in 1998. Wife in 2002.
Sheesh. It is like history stared in 2003 for you guys.
Really. There is a lot of stuff on line about this including Congressional resolutions. You ought to check it out some time. Getting whipped with facts has got to hurt. You could avoid such embarrassment with a little judicious study.
Building on that, here's the question for the "leave them alone" crowd — what was the correct Libertarian response in 1990 to an invasion of a USA ally by the Ba'ath regime in Iraq? As Simon points out, the action in 2003 was just a sequel to that making it nonsensical to talk about the latter without reference to the former.
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