Pat Buchanon recommended and for some reason I read, although I’m not Buchanon fan at all, a book called ‘the illusion of victory’, and it purports that we are all worse off for going into world war I and that we had no business going over there. I wasn’t a die hard convert after reading it, although I respected the mans opinion, but recently I’ve been reconsidering, it actually makes a lot of sense. You say ‘how can we do nothing’? Well, what if doing nothing yields the best result?
The point is these are not ‘wacked out’ theories, but carefullly constructed opinions held by many prominent persons.
Were we “worse off” for having gone into World War I? Well, the voters in 1920 thought so, which is why they elected Warren Harding president and tried to isolate themselves from the trainwreck that was the “Great War.” They throught they could do this because the Unbited States was simply the box car of a very long train. Today everyone thinks of Wilson as an idealistic fool, but he understood that the War had broken western civilization and that radical measures had to be taken to keep it from collapsing. Would the League have worked with the United States as part of it? Who knows? We do now that the Proud Tower of the West had been cracked and that eventually it did collapse with only the United States left standing.
Doing nothing yields the best result? Six million Jews might disagree. So might untold millions of Eastern Europeans who are now freed from the Soviets. I served in South Korea, I can guarantee you that there are millions there who are well fed and prosperous while their countrymen to the north are starving in the dark.
And lets discuss more about American policy in the mid-east being the on-off switch for terrorism....
You surely are aware of Bernard Lewis’s recent column in the WSJ::
Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington’s handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled — or misruled — half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution “strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan.” The words “condemn” and “aggression” were not used, and the source of the “intervention” was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the non-voting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.
Again, the simple ‘we exercise influence in the Mideast so they hate us’ does not validly describe history or human affairs.