Hunkered Between Santorum and Paul Lies Peace Through Total War
“We cannot bring civility to the uncivilized, dispense freedom as if it were ours to give, or hasten in tribal hearts and mystic minds the principles and values discovered over centuries of Western Enlightenment. It is neither our duty nor our place. Our duty is protect ourselves, and that means eliminating threats.”
Why don’t you take this argument to its logical conclusion. The problem our politicians and military have today is this fetish for “nation building.” This was and always has been a terrible idea, going back to the war in Vietnam. For some strange reason American politicians always believe that if we sink in enough money, weapons, and training (and American lives) that every nation on this planet can be turned into Iowa. That simply is NOT the case. Afghanistan is the perfect example of that. How many hundreds of billions of dollars have we sunk into that pathetic “country” and what do we have to show for it? A country that has no intention of joining the 17th century, let alone the 21st. This is a backward tribal society and nothing we can say or do will change that. They really only care about their tribes and Islam and we will forever be seen as infidels and outsiders. We will win no victories in places like Afghanistan, no matter how many Taliban fighters we kill.
What our military SHOULD be used for is the actual defense of this nation and for what the British used to call “Punitive Expedition.” During the days of the British Empire, there were times when British forces attacked a country for the simple reason of teaching them a lesson. They were not trying to convert them or convince them that their form of government was the best. All they wanted to do was kill as many of the enemy as possible, make a severe military point, and then leave. Think about how different our experience in Afghanistan would have been if we had simply gone into Afghanistan in 2001, killed (not arrested or put in Guantanamo Bay, but actually killed) as many of al Qaeda and the Taliban as possible, and then simply left, with the warning that if they ever tried anything like 9/11 again, we would incinerate their country. We would have more than avenged the attack of 9/11 and we would have saved billions of dollars and the lives of hudreds of American troops. I firmly believe they would have accepted that message because they would have been convinced that we meant it.
But no, Bush and Obama were positively convinced that this poor excuse of a “country” could be turned into some form of democracy, even though everything they have done in the past 11 years has shown that they cannot. We cannot dispense freedom to countries that have no desire to have it and who simply want to cling to their 14th century standard of living. It is time we get rid of this horrible idea of “nation building.” If we did so, I doubt that the American public would object to very limited forms of military intervention, such as when American hostages are taken by Somali pirates. This is what our military should be used for, the protection of American lives, not as a instrument to turn worthless people into a democracy they do not want.
