Mitt Romney: The need for a mighty U.S. military
He argues "a mighty US military" is needed to oppose evil in the world, defend peace, etc. etc.
He does not argue or even claim, apart from a casual afterthought at the very end, that so much is necessary for the constitutional goal of providing for the common defense of the states of the Union.
Nobody trying to control the vast machinery of the US military starts out asking, "What do we need simply and purely to provide for the common defense of the United States?"
Much less does anyone stop there.
It's always "Ohmigosh, terrible things will happen all over the world unless we step in to stop them and, if we don't, why it'll just mean another world war!"
As if everyone had forgotten that both world wars were, for the US, wars of choice.
As if it went without saying that if something somehow becomes a world war it won't be because we chose to make it so, or because we stupidly extended guarantees and made alliances that could do us no good and could do us only harm, ourselves turning regional conflicts into world wars.
This is Mitt's oath of allegiance to the neocons and his way of differentiating his brand from Rand Paul.
He writes,
Some argue that the United States should simply withdraw its military strength from the world — get out of the Middle East, accept nuclear weapons in Iran and elsewhere, let China and Russia have their way with their neighbors and watch from the sidelines as jihadists storm on two or three continents.
Do this, they contend, and the United States would be left alone.
No, we would not.
The history of the 20th century teaches that power-hungry tyrants ultimately feast on the appeasers — to use former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s phrase, we would be paying the cannibals to eat us last.
And in the meantime, our economy would be devastated by the disruption of trade routes, the turmoil in global markets and the tumult of conflict across the world.
Global peace and stability are very much in our immediate national interest.
He is arguing against me; I am one of those "some," and I say "Horse-feathers."
That next to last sentence is something he just made up - a made up consequence of a equally made up scenario of extraordinary global mess due to a silly America that turned its back.
It is a Bogeyman to frighten children.
The last sentence is blatantly untrue; even if they were in some measure and manner in our national interest they would not be in our immediate national interest, and certainly not in anything remotely like out vital national interest.
As to the rest, Hitler was not coming to Long Island.
Stalin was never going to go for Martha's Vineyard.
Mao posed no threat to Los Angeles.
Ho Chi Minh never made a single American in Seattle or Portland lose sleep.
The New China is not coming across the Pacific after us, and Putin is not coming across the Atlantic.
It's just not happening.
To the extent that they pose a threat, it is exactly because we are over there, in their parts of the world, sticking our fingers up their noses, and they are annoyed.
There are no dominoes from Southeast Asia to San Francisco, and an American stronghold in Iraq is no more a forward defense of New York Harbor than was or is an American air force station in Berlin.
As for terrorism, remember how it actually works.
It is a totally separate issue from defense against actual military forces or actual powerful countries.
19 guys arrive legally and weaponless in the US from different points of origin.
They board a couple planes, one or two of them armed with box cutters.
They crash the planes into conspicuous targets.
Or brothers who legally came here from Canada plant a bomb under and grandstand.
Or somebody born here parks a truck full of fertilizer in a garage under an FBI office.
The 9/11 attacks could have happened at any time since the beginning of commercial air travel.
Aircraft carriers and guided missile destroyers cannot prevent and are no defense against such things.
A naval fleet patrolling the East China Sea does nothing to diminish that threat.
A flock of B 1's in Lithuania would be totally irrelevant.
And they would be just as irrelevant stationed in Cairo or Baghdad.
The war part of the "war on terror" we have been fighting since 2001 has done nothing to diminish the threat of such attacks on the US.
It may even have made it worse.
To all appearances, instead of shutting down global schools of terrorism our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and our other military actions throughout the region have been encouraging the business, causing it to grow and spread.
We hope and piously believe the actual anti-terrorist part of the "war on terror," the NSA, FBI, CIA, Homeland Defense part, has done some good.
But only a fool thinks it can't happen again.
And only a fool thinks American military globalismo - as old as McKinley and TR - is really about either terrorism or American national defense.
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