BTW, the foreign entanglements issue is one that is important. I didn’t mean to gloss over it.
We live in a very small world today. We’re not traveling to some distant foreign land that doesn’t mean anything these days. People from those lands wind up in the U.S. on a daily basis at our airports.
So what do we do when attacked by terrorists? Well, we make those terrorists pay a very heavy price for having done so. I believe we have made them pay a very heavy price.
Folks said that Iraq wasn’t involved in 09/11, and was not an anti-American threat. Strangely enough, tens of thousands of terrorists disagreed enough to die on the soil of Iraq fighting our troops.
Look, Thomas Jefferson himself supported the War against the Barbary Pirates. There were foreign entanglements even in his day. And he joined in those efforts.
We either fight on foreign soil and project American values there, or we crawl back into our shell and allow another nation to become the world’s hegemon.
That’s just the sad, or not so sad, reality of it IMO.
I don't disagree. But the real reason for Iraq is simple, regardless of the stated cause: It is far easier to kill them in a sandbox than in the rocky crags of Afghanistan. That simple logic was a master stroke as far as I am concerned.
Yet that is where the logic stopped. Americans have always required a just cause and dire purpose in order to go to war. Yet we kill Al Queda in Iraq and Afghanistan with one hand, and are allied to them in Albania, Chechnya, and Kosovo with the other. And while Washington proclaims the terrible threat of terrorists on American soil, that damnable southern border remains wide open, and wholly undefended. It makes no sense.
What about the Christians being slaughtered in Ethiopia and the Sudan by the self same terrorist network? We sit and twiddle our thumbs. All of Africa is tipping over. Whole nations... We do nothing.
Either this radical network is the enemy they proclaim, and we fight them tooth and nail on every front, or their threat to us is not as advertised and this is all a play for power on a massive global scale.
Alot of what you said is true - But we are a long way from the original Conservative ideal: Back in the day, Reagan convinced Gorbachev to stand down because "America doesn't start wars", and Gorbachev believed him... Would anyone believe that today?
These are among the things that civil libertarians would point to in their objections, and they have a legitimate objection. That is why I stated that a Conservative at the helm would have placated them greatly. Most of what I have mentioned above would have been different.