Posted on 09/08/2012 1:55:25 PM PDT by oliverdarcy
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attacked libertarians on Wednesday, suggesting their anti-interventionist positions would result in a more a dangerous world if put into practice.
“I have no doubt that if the people of that persuasion who are against, who are non-interventionist if you will... if they prevail I think the world will be a less safe place,” Rumsfeld said in an exclusive interview with Campus Reform earlier this week.
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreform.org ...
And a little restraint would go a long way too.
We can’t afford to keep intervening. And we certainly can’t play the world’s policeman, intervening in places that are not our direct interest.
Non-American people have been complaining about how America thinks it’s the world’s policeman and how it’s sticking its nose everywhere.
Me, I think it’s time the world cop went on vacation for about a decade. Watch what happens; for starters, all those European states will be forced to dismantle their comfortable welfare states.
He has this right. There are too many others bucking to take the world police role from the USA, and they all have a bent for global totalitarianism.
According to whom? A college blog?
How about posting from the actual sources.
Thank you Mr. Rumsfeld.
Allowing people to not be in padded cells for their entire lives makes people less safe too. So does letting them eat in restaurants or driving cars or engaging in trade. Notwithstanding these risks, we don’t require people to be in padded cells and we let them eat out, drive, and all sorts of other things. Even though it makes the whole world less safe, Mr. Rumsfeld.
I suspect that if Reagan had just started his first term when 9/11 happened, we would have been in and out of Afghanistan before the end of his second term. Its had to say whether he would have messed with Iraq but if he did, it would have been long since over.
I certainly don’t think we would be playing games with Pakistan and its unlikely that we would have had any involvement in Libya.
I don’t think we should be non interventionist but when we do intervene we should just leave a big pile of ruble and let them deal with it.
I’m not anti war.
I’m anti nation building.
Isn't that exactly what Rumsfeld is saying? "Let them eat out, drive, all sorts of other things"...leaving the police (or whoever) to intervene when necessary, to protect others?
A strict policy of non-intervention leaves the rest of the world to the thugs -- thus becoming a world that is most assuredly not in our best national interest.
He is right.
Libertarian foreign policy would be a disaster. RonPaul Liberaltarians are even worse.
Peace through Strength is the best way to stay at peace, not to mention is spurs hi tech job spinoff and puts our engineers to work on constitutional priorities.
Afghan we had to go into, after 911. Iraq, wasn’t as strong a case, but it would have been negligence for Bush to ignore the Intel that he was given.
However, after it was obvious that the WMD either wasn’t there or was sneaked out to Syria, we should have given Iraq 6 months to stabilize their government, and we should should have been gone.
Absolutely! My son, who builds the bombs that makes the rubble is “sick of screwing around in the sandbox.”
Our world would be a hell of a lot safer if we were protecting our own borders.
In the runup years to WWII, while Hitler was expanding, two world leaders saw it, discussed it, prepared for it. FDR and Churchill.
At the time, the GOP was non-interventionist. WWI had been awful, and within a few years nothing was really settled. Hence the non-interventionists decided it best to stay out of Europe’s centuries long wars.
Had the US jumped into Europe sooner, it may have hastened the defeat of Hitler. Nobody knows.
Since then, the GOP has shifted poles, now favoring “peace through strength” as Reagan advised.
The GOP anti-war, non-interventionists are whackos.
I would argue that any war worth fighting is worth starting and finishing fast, minimum dead Americans, maximum destruction and dead enemies.
The idea of saving muslims’ lives is misguided.
After WWII the Japanese knew who won the war, knew why the US dropped nuclear bombs on their citizens.
We owe muslims no less certainty.
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it. If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.
— George Washington
If we don’t intervene, somebody else will...and we’re not going to like the results.
The only thing that we need to do is make sure we have a clear objective. After 9/11, we had one...and then it got diluted because Bush was too timid and too easily browbeaten by the left to defend his positions or to defend Rumsfeld, for that matter.
The other thing that it means is no kissing of Muslim posteriors. Muslims are the enemy; the other enemies (China, Russia, etc.) have some interest in survival, but the Muslims simply don’t care and would take the whole world down with them. So we’ve got to work out a way of making sure that doesn’t happen, while at the same time not letting either Russia or China take our place as the big dog.
And that’s what Obama is allowing to happen.
The Father Of Our Country was a wise man.
Whatever happened to avoiding “nation building?”
I’m all for kicking @ss when needed, but it seems to me that direct and full-on wars in 3rd world countries hasn’t gotten us much.
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