[quote]Grimnuruk wrote:
Ok, Here I gotta say that we are very lucky in that most of the people we need to be thanking are DEAD. Very few of my Grandfather’s generation are left who fought in WWII, a real honest war of aggression and conquest. History shows us that these kinds of conquest attempts are now much rarer than smaller, asymmetrical maneuvers designed to gain without much loss or be noticed by the rest of the world. The conflicts you list tend be those of deterrence, where we/the U.S. as a superpower, must flex our muscle as it were, to the rest of the primates to ensure that we remain in our high socio-economic-military status. It is essential to note that these “lesser” conflicts serve the same purpose as the Ragnorak like convulsions of a the World Wars, just in a more limited (time, space, gains, losses) fashion.
In this connected “flat world” that we find ourselves in, no one can afford to deny that all the different status factors of a nation are intertwined. Our western standard of living cannot be removed from our Alpha Male status as a military superpower anymore than our demand for equal rights among races and sexes can.
There has to be certain amount of affluence, security and maturity for these to occur and that can require the painful acceptance of past violence on our behalf to achieve it.[/quote]
I’m well aware of the neocon strategy and the logic behind it, which is quite sound. It’s the premises which I disagree with. If you start with a faulty premise, you can’t end up in the right place no matter if every one of your subsequent decisions is correct.
I know that all of the minor interventions and invasions are justified as being part of a larger, global conflict - be it anti-terror, anti-drug, anti-fascist or bolshevist. If you accept the legitimacy of the latter, and you subscribe to the long-standing domino theory held by conservatives, then there is no choice but to support all of the minor interventions as they arise.
The problem with the overall strategy, at least from a Libertarian perspective, is that it starts to resemble a typical big government program. It grows and grows, feeding off itself until it breaks the laws of physics and becomes a perpetual motion machine. Of course, this can only occur through clever manipulation by politicians. Every failure and every success is used as a justification to either keep the program running or expand it. If a plane crashes, the incident is immediately used to justify increased governmental regulation of the airline industry. And if there are no plane crashes one year, the government takes the credit for it.
Libertarians are well aware of this trickery as it has been continually used to decieve the population and grossly enlarge the federal government over the past century.
Libertarians know that war is the largest government program of all and it has been used throughout history to scare populations into compliance and empower tyrants.
Quite simply, the ultimate realization of the neocon strategy is perpetual war for perpetual peace. This is considered unacceptable by strict Constitutionalists, for rather obvious reasons.
The war industry in America was set in motion by WWII and was largely sustained by inertia until September the 11th, 2001, which gave it another hefty push (some would raise questions about the convenient timing of such an event).
Neo-Conservatives and Libertarians also take different interpretations of past military conflicts, particularly the two world wars. Libertarian doctrine holds that the U.S. involvement in each of them was unnecessary and ultimately detrimental to the U.S. Libertarians readily accept the idea, as do neocons, that we are where we are today largely as a result of WWII. And that’s where they part company, since the latter group sees U.S. involvement in that conflict to be justified and the former does not.
I don’t think that anyone can build a case to refute the claim that what this country has been doing since the Spanish-American war amounts to imperialism. The only things left to discuss, then, are whether or not imperialism is justified, for whom, and on what grounds.
As the minor military conflicts pile up, they start to become disconnected from the larger, global conflict – in reality. Yet in the public sphere, this association is never damaged, so long as the government and the press choose to maintain it. Critics of isolated policies are defamed with the same derision that would otherwise be reserved for those who opposed the central strategy, even if this does not pertain to them.
I don’t think that neocons do a good enough job of explaining their strategy to their opponents. They could, perhaps, win some converts by improving in this area. What they ought to realize is that nobody (save for a tiny and neglible minority) genuinely “hates” America and wants to see it defeated. People, quite understandably, simply don’t see how invading places like Grenada and Kuwait is “making the world [or America] safe for democracy”. Neocons ought realize that every new invasion is NOT Operation D-Day – there has been and continues to be a boatload of corruption and profiteering associated with America’s global conflicts.