One position we share with only the leftmost wing of the left is that of opposition to aggressive war. We used to share this with the rest of America but the definition of a defensive war has become so muddled since 9-11-2001.
Opposition to war should not be confused with opposition to having a strong military. To the contrary, a strong military is a major deterrent against the outbreak of war.
"Defense" Hawks often portray the anti-war movement as being in some way emotionally opposed to war, and the image of a 60's era hippie comes to kind, that is, without any practical reasoning.
Perhaps the anti-war left does feel that way, but libertarians claim logic and ethics as allies in the struggle to end this unending war.
I'm 30 years old as I type this. By 2014, and counting Iraq 1 and maybe Kosovo, I will have spent more years of my life in a country at war than years in times of peace.
Democratic Wars and Republican Wars and justified wars and illegal wars and distraction wars and wars begun by gunslingers and Nobel Peace Prize winners alike.
It's enough already.
I claim logic because one needs only to look to the past to see wars are always how counties overextend themselves, and every empire ever, sooner or later, fell in part by over-extension Whether or not we've reached that point is debatable.
But we can't be far off. We're just really beginning to grasp the scope of PTSD and how it can weaken our armed services. All the fancy gadgets in the world mean very little when the people trained to operate them have become overworked, stressed, and in the worst cases irrevocably damaged.
One would think a "conservative" in the strictest sense of the word would want to, uhh, conserve their military forces, upon which the bedrock is founded for all of America's greatest shit.
But after endless re-deployments and year after year of hard, dry, mentally exhausting living, can we say our military is in the best shape possible?
And are we achieving our goals?
What is the grand aim of the War on Terror? To make the world safe? Civilized? Democratized?
For democracy to function, it's roots must come from within the state itself. Forcing democracy, or any form of government for that matter, from without is commonly referred to as a coup in many circles. And despite the goodness of the intentions, foreign powers imposing their will are seldom well received.
As we have witnessed over the last decade or so, these designs don't go over very well with the locals, especially in the ancient cultures of the Middle East.
Self-government requires the "self" after all.
But what ethical right do we have to change another's government? If these people want their abject poverty and backwards interpretation of a religion let em' have at it. We got our guy already.
But besides the hunt for Bin Laden, which I can think we can all agree falls under the defensive category, every other war (Iraq 1&2, Kosovo, Libya Yemen, Mali, and coming soon Syria and North Korea) has been unnecessary.
In the cases involving the Arab Spring, we risk inciting new America-haters by once again meddling in far-off, culturally unfamiliar countries, and propping up decidedly undemocratic leaders like Mubarak.
The point is, why do we keep doing something that doesn't work, costs lives on both sides (usually theirs), and is drying up our treasure and credit at a rate that by any standard is unsustainable?
And I didn't even mention mere excess in the defense budget; a topic for another time. Let's just say our opposition to war here at MF is logically stiffer than daisy stems and more respectful of the troops than any 0.5-term governor ever was.
No comments:
Post a Comment