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 ...
I agree on nation-building. Especially, muslim natons. They are incapable and undeserving of our assistance. It’s a waste of both money and lives.
Well that’s the Commie/Collectivist view of WW2. The other view is more nuanced and favors an America 1st strategy instead of the FDR/Churchill Fascism vs Fascism. Hoover and Patton alluded to the real mistake of WW2....we should have finished off Stalin before being involved in the Pacific or Europe. I wager that eventually we will know the truth about the machinations by FDR/his Commie Adm. and the idiot Churchill’s manipulations of our country into allying with the evil totalitarian Stalin....murderer of > 100 million innocents!
Let me try to figure this out. With special operations personnel on the ground and a fleet of B-52s, we toppled the Taliban within a few months of 9-11. Even Ron Paul voted for the use of force for that mission. But was that the end of it?
No.
Since our amazing fast, relatively cheap and total victory in Afghanistan, we have lost, I don’t know, is it 10,000 dead and 50,000 badly wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which we achieved nothing in Iraq and less than that in Afghanistan.
All of our allies are leaving Afghanistan, and we’re scheduled to leave the next following year, and the Afghanis are already making their deals with the Taliban.
The Arab spring has resulted in Islamicist governments in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the prospect of an Islamicist government in Yemen, and a civil war in Syria with an outcome that is in doubt.
Iran is this close to having the nuclear bomb and has the means to hit Israel with nuclear bombs.
Oh, and least I forget, we now sending National Guard units to Africa.
Thank goodness the libertarians aren’t in charge of our foreign policy, otherwise things wouldn’t be safe.
By his decision to get us into Iraq, Bush risked the Republican majority. We subsequently lost the House and Senate in ‘06, and the White House in ‘08. We are now saddled with a mountain of debt and Obamacare. The upcoming election looks like a toss-up right now. This country may fall into real economic decline, the suspension of civil liberties, communism, and even the possibility of secession. With a weakened U.S., Iran will be emboldened. Rumsfeld fired the economist who refused to testify to Congress that the War in Iraq would be cheap and pay for itself. If nothing else, Rumsfeld owes the nation an apology for being so very wrong about that war. Bush and Obama both owe the nation apologies for “mission creep” in Afghanistan, a place that we could never have done anything about (other than kill the bastards, which we did, thank you, within a few months of their attack on us.) But, really what will an apology mean if we lose this fall’s election.
“Well that’s the Commie/Collectivist view of WW2. The other view is more nuanced and favors an America 1st strategy instead of the FDR/Churchill Fascism vs Fascism. Hoover and Patton alluded to the real mistake of WW2....we should have finished off Stalin before being involved in the Pacific or Europe. I wager that eventually we will know the truth about the machinations by FDR/his Commie Adm. and the idiot Churchill’s manipulations of our country into allying with the evil totalitarian Stalin....murderer of > 100 million innocents!”
Among conservatives with opinions worth consideraion, your view of “the idiot Churchill” is very clearly a minority one.
Are Buchanan and Hitler your favored guys in this?
Sorry, Rummy, any point you had is lost in the fool’s errand of nation building.
I’m not a non-interventionist libertarian, but I don’t think we should build bridges and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, either.
We can’t intervene and limit our options with limiting, self-defeating rules of engagement. We should’ve kicked ass and started a mass migration of refugees towards Iran, Syria, and Pakistan to destabilize them.
Realistically speaking, there might be a dozen or two places around the world of enough concern for US military involvement. But we are in over 100 deployments.
This means that 75% of our overseas deployments are just wasted on hand holding and mostly because nobody wants to summon them home.
I got to see a great example of this in the 1980s, with a multinational humanitarian mission sent to Mali, Africa. To start with, for minimal work for maybe 20 men, an entire 500 man battalion was sent. The mission was finished in a few weeks.
But nobody would recall them. Finally the battalion commander asked the brigade commander to personally ask the Pentagon, but nobody there would make a decision. After six months of torpor, the brigade commander finally ordered them home himself.
Nobody objected. Nobody cared.
But that is the condition of a lot of these deployments. Nobody wants to order them home because it *might* “make waves”. And the vast majority of people think there is a *reason* for the deployments. Often, the only reason is just inertia.
Rumsfeld's point would have more weight if the administrations he was involved with didn't themselves ignore many brewing problems and fail to intervene when they could have. No doubt he's got a reason why the US should intervene in some cases but not others, and his reasons for non-intervention probably sound just about the same as the libertarians' reasons.
Bush had withdrawn most of the troops from Afghanistan, it was winding down, waiting for Iraq to stabilize. It was Obama who insisted that Afghanistan was the “right war” and instituted the surge in Afghanistan.
“By his decision to get us into Iraq, Bush risked the Republican majority.”
Leaders don’t send troops to war based on whether it is politically expedient. The Intel Bush got made it imperative that we go to Iraq.
His error was not in going to Iraq, but in not getting the hell out after the WMD was not found.
I suspect you are more of a national security conservative than I am.
I appreciate that, in spite of opposing Bush’s war on terror (whatever that refers to) prior to his election, Obama wound up basically following through on the plans that had been laid out during the Bush Administration.
Just as General Schwarzkopf said that he, as a theater commander, had to be a strategist, a tactician, and a logistician, in addition to being a general and a soldier, so too does the leader of a democratic nation engaged in a “long war” (as is envisioned in certain military circles) have to lead the people, see to it that the economy is running well, that the finances of the country are in good shape, and that the families of the country are functioning as they need to be.
But, Bush and Obama have demonstrated that they are about as competent of fulfilling the obligations of a leader of a democratic country engaged in a long war as Schwarzkopf found Saddam to be as an adversary.
If our country really is at risk because of something over there, we are now much weaker than we were in 2001 in terms of running our military personnel down, wearing out our weapons systems, using up our reserves of munitions, exhausting our allies, emptying our treasury, destroying our economy, and disrupting family formation.
And, we face the real prospect of a neo-Marxist radical being re-elected President.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? For every WWII, where we absolutely have to win, there’s a half dozen Koreas, Vietnams, Iraqs and Afghanistans, where we just get sucked into a mess that even when we win, we lose.
You nailed it. If we stop "meddling", eventually it will literally be us against the rest of the world or suffer the rest of the assimilation that the Left has been pushing. The same folks that think we should stay the hell home are also griping about how we are losing our sovereignty and don't realize that the libertarian "solution" will insure we become exactly like the rest of the world - in all its worst aspects.
“we are now much weaker than we were in 2001 in terms of running our military personnel down, wearing out our weapons systems, using up our reserves of munitions, exhausting our allies, emptying our treasury, destroying our economy, and disrupting family formation.”
None of which can be blamed on the Iraq military phase, which was over quickly and with a loss of about 200 lives. If we we leave after that phase, none of your listed factors, come into play.
That was the plan (at least as it was stated to the public). We were supposed to be replaced by the blue helmets. In and out, like the Persian Gulf War. And, wasn’t that the idea with Afghanistan? But, in both places, we got dragged into the mission of transforming the nations into viable democracies. Mission creep. The civilians thinking that the military, which is designed for one purpose, namely, destruction, could be used, along with “soft power” (i.e., international welfare), for another purpose, construction.
Let’s turn the clock back fifty years, to Jack Kennedy getting us into Viet Nam. It is thought, whimsically, that he would have avoided the mission creep. This is wishful thinking and contradicted by the fact that it was he who ordered the assassination of Diem. But, Jack Kennedy had the good fortune to depart the White House which shifted the mission creep to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Riding the ghost of JFK, Baines got re-elected in a landslide. But, two years later, the Republicans won the mid-term elections (outside of the still one-party South) and four years later, won the Presidency. That “go any where, bear any burden” thing really didn’t endear the Democrats to the American people.
On the other hand, having a strong national defense that precluded a military option to the communists, and waiting for the inevitable collapse of their system, we won the Cold War without having fired a shot. Ronbo saw the big picture. Which is why he supported a bulked up military and also refused to allow the country to get sucked into unwinnable situations like Lebanon.
That was the plan (at least as it was stated to the public). We were supposed to be replaced by the blue helmets. In and out, like the Persian Gulf War. And, wasn’t that the idea with Afghanistan? But, in both places, we got dragged into the mission of transforming the nations into viable democracies. Mission creep. The civilians thinking that the military, which is designed for one purpose, namely, destruction, could be used, along with “soft power” (i.e., international welfare), for another purpose, construction.
Let’s turn the clock back fifty years, to Jack Kennedy getting us into Viet Nam. It is thought, whimsically, that he would have avoided the mission creep. This is wishful thinking and contradicted by the fact that it was he who ordered the assassination of Diem. But, Jack Kennedy had the good fortune to depart the White House which shifted the mission creep to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Riding the ghost of JFK, Baines got re-elected in a landslide. But, two years later, the Republicans won the mid-term elections (outside of the still one-party South) and four years later, won the Presidency. That “go any where, bear any burden” thing really didn’t endear the Democrats to the American people.
On the other hand, having a strong national defense that precluded a military option to the communists, and waiting for the inevitable collapse of their system, we won the Cold War without having fired a shot. Ronbo saw the big picture. Which is why he supported a bulked up military and also refused to allow the country to get sucked into unwinnable situations like Lebanon.
>>It was Obama who insisted that Afghanistan was the “right war” and instituted the surge in Afghanistan.
Exactamundo!
“Ronbo saw the big picture. Which is why he supported a bulked up military and also refused to allow the country to get sucked into unwinnable situations like Lebanon”
Well, Reagan actually did get sucked into Lebanon, under the auspices of the Blue helmet to boot.
The only difference was Reagan was smart enough to get out quickly.
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