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Monday, October 4, 2010

God Love Pat Buchanan...

Again, it should be noted that I don't agree with Mr. Buchanan on everything. Perhaps most notably, I think he substantially underrates the threat militant Islam poses to the world (ourselves included) and overrates how quiet Dar al Islam would be if we just completely dropped everything in the Middle East and cleared on out of there.

My principle objection to how we have been fighting the War on Terror is that we keep operating on what I believe to be a very bad assumption: that we can, for lack of a better word, "democratize" societies grounded on beliefs that simply do not, and never have, esteemed democratic values or republican government. Foreign policy based on bad assumptions is ultimately doomed to failure.

But on the following, yes, I do believe Mr. Buchanan has a point...
Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.

Why should Americans, 65 years after World War II, be defending rich Europeans from a Soviet Union that has been dead for 20 years, so those same Europeans can cut their defense budgets to protect their social safety nets?

President Eisenhower told JFK to bring the troops home from Europe, or the Europeans would wind up as permanent wards.

Was Ike a closet isolationist?

Almost $14 trillion in debt today, we borrow from Europe to defend Europe, borrow from Japan to defend Japan, borrow from the Gulf Arabs to defend the Gulf Arabs. And we borrow from Beijing to send foreign aid to African regimes whose U.N. delegations laughed and applauded as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. Have we lost all sense of self-respect?

In his 1969 “Silent Majority” address, Richard Nixon said that, after Vietnam, America would provide Asian allies with weapons and assistance in defending their freedom. But Americans would no longer do the fighting.

Why are U.S. soldiers still on the DMZ, 57 years after the Korean War? Why are Marines still on Okinawa, 65 years after Gen. MacArthur took the surrender? Cannot Korea and Japan, prosperous and populous, conscript the soldiers for their own defense?

National security, yes. Empire security we can no longer afford.

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