| | Kurt, seems we've been down this path before, hasn't it?
:-)
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Ed, if you attack and destroy the country's regime, you can leave it in anarchy or stay and fix it up so that it becomes an ally, rather than another enemy in a few years. The short term may look attractive to destroy then leave, but all that means is we have to keep doing it over and over again.
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Kurt, you're assuming that sporadic, but persistent, destruction of unlawful regimes (something I advocate) -- won't teach folks manners. As if some folks can't even -- in principle! -- learn and grow (with a slew of hard knocks, courtesy of the US) toward what is better.
Making this assumption, that billions of humans are unthinking irredeemables (cattle, if you will), you are naturally led to propose a Team of Americans as the World's Police. And, while it's true that we currently know better about the best interests of most Middle-Easterners (better than they do themselves) -- this fact does not rationally justify the extreme increase in statism that world-policing entails. Only altruism does.
Your attempts to equate historically-successful interventionism (ie. Japan, post WWII) with current events are, in my view, left wanting. You want to drag these folks -- while they're kicking and screaming -- into that grand ideal "connectivity." If you can do it with your own resources, fine. My problem with this is that you can't -- you need my resources, too. You need to tax me for things I don't believe in -- and that is a horrendous violation.
I've already outlined how the free-market can "deal" with unlawful regimes (while making a profit at it!). You'll likely say -- in response -- that, as long as we spend a one or two trillion dollars on this problem now, that we would then get into a position where the "connectivity" became profitable for us. In other words, we are to have faith that the tax-funded force we yield now -- will economically yield a pot of gold at the end of a several decades (and perhaps a full century), 1-2 trillion dollar rainbow.
A 50-100% increase in the already-enormous, redistributed wealth in this country -- that is what your action plan entails. Run the numbers, man. Half a million soldiers continuously deployed (and taken out of our economy) for likely several decades, and guess who pays for their living expenses? For what? Connectivity. At whose expense? Ours. For whose benefit? Ours. Really? In the first decade? Well, no. In the first decade of our tremendously increased spending, it is they who will primarily benefit from our wealth and productivity. But, after a couple decades of enormous redistributions of our wealth, then ...
I just don't buy it, Kurt. Though I know that the leftist NeoCons will find ways to force me to buy this product.
Ed
Anti-Machiavello-NeoCon-Straussian
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