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With all due respect your passage is mired in the minutiae and is unable to articulate the ripple effect of dropping the stone in the pond. Simply put, the inference is wrong.

The principle in the main is that an incomplete intervention sets conditions that require further intervention.

As an example, a surgeon can remove a bullet to save the life of a wounded person, but leaving that wounded person bleeding to death on the table renders the prior act of saving the life pointless.

Reagan’s efforts freed hundreds of millions behind the Iron Curtain but left a vacuum that was filled by persons and sects that established breeding grounds for Bin Laden and global jihad.

What Reagan ultimately decided in regards to Afghanistan and what Rand is defending in regards to our constitutional rights are both correct. The two are not in opposition. The Soviet Union was our mortal enemy. The Afghan intervention was expected to cause swarms of jihad to spread globally.

The correct followup action to treating the bleeding that threatens the patient on the table is to either rely on thrombosis or stanch the flow or a combination thereof.

Thrombosis in this case refers to the popular push-back of jihad which occurs and has occurred naturally as long as the US does not disrupt the natural process of social coagulation. This occurred in Pakistan where the society there rejected jihad but embraced its literal children; many of the jihadists had taken refuge there and their sons and daughters grew up and intermarried into the general population.

What Cheney is defending is the mummification of the patient to stop the bleeding without regards to suffocation of constitutional rights. What Rand is advocating are compresses, sutures, needle and thread.

The two arguments are an ideological argument of which Rand sides with American ideals and Cheney sides with the New World Order. The two arguments are diametrically opposed and the winner of the argument will depend on the awareness of the American people which is why freerepublic.com exists.

The world is an imperfect place and sometimes you do what you have to do. Arming the mujihadeen helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, a clear case of the ends justifying the means. We defeated the bigger problem — communism — and are now in the process of defeating the smaller problem of islamic terrorism. In a more perfect world we wouldn’t have to go about things this way, but that’s not the world we live in. There’s a utopian streak on the right that’s nearly as unreasonable as its counterpart on the left.