Just Sayin

In my opinion, too much of our foreign policy – past and present – has made us look to an awful lot of the world like the bully on the block: meddlesome, aggressive, and spoiling for a fight.

We are the terrorists!

It seems that our aim is to make others knuckle under to our interests, economic and political; and those who refuse or resist we call evil; branding them as Terrorists, and imposing economic restrictions on them that inevitably lead to military confrontation. Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military-industrial complex years ago, and we did not listen. Thomas Jefferson rejected ‘entangling alliances’, which are no more than a kind of servitude – where we end up being obligated to provide financial or military assistance to other countries, and even to intervene in others’ sovereign affairs. Instead of heeding Jefferson’s wise counsel, however, we now shove them down our friends’ throats in the name of ‘coalition’ and ‘international solidarity’ – mostly so that we can damn well do as we please, but still look like we’re merely one nation among many with the same aim and goal. So now we are stuck in a conquest-model of world dominance that alienates many would-be friends, provides our enemies with an unbeatable recruitment tool, and that has, inevitably, provided the decay and demise of our freedoms and – outside of a small military-industrial elite - dissipate any semblance of wealth we may accumulate.

I have been asked many times on my feelings about the war on Terrorism. Terrorism is defined as, “The use of fear to intimidate people, esp. for political reasons”. This is the definition from the dictionary, but what I find intriguing is that most of the laws and policies created to “fight” terror are accomplishing the exact thing that the government trying to demonize! Aren’t the current policies of our government, at every level, doing just that? We have militarization of the police, Municipal and federal forces breaking down the doors of innocent people, forcing compliance at gunpoint, shooting inoffensive people to death on the street, detaining and beating people for standing up for their constitutionally protected rights, and assaulting our natural freedoms in the name of safety but, in fact, using fear and intimidation to force compliance! This is the very definition of political terrorism! If our leaders truly seek our safety and aim to protect our liberty, their accusations and secret surveillance should be directed at Washington, not at the American people nor the world community.

We have declared war not on an enemy nation, not on an ideology, like Fascism or Communism, not on an economic or political opponent, not even on pirates (like Jefferson did), but on what is simply a tactic; and since this, our foe, is not a country, nor an army, nor the Jolly Roger, I ask: Can you declare war on an emotion? Or on a religious doctrine? Or on a clothing style? Should we go to war against sadness, elation, heresy, or plaid shirts? That’d be no more ludicrous than the War on Terror. It is an unending fight, against an unknown enemy, (who can be anyone who disagrees with us and now, ALL American citizens) with no identifiable objective (how will we know when/if we’ve won – or lost?), that rides roughshod over long-recognized principles of national sovereignty, and the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of American citizens on American soil.

In its efforts to make both the American people and our world-partners accede to our interests (domination?), our government has, since the 1970s, maintained our country in an endless state of emergency. But, as I see it, the only real emergency is the present and urgent need to halt the government’s assault on our liberty, our rights, and our Constitution. We must end the policies that bulldoze the rights that our Constitution is supposed to protect, end the militarization of our police forces, and debunk the eternal ‘state of emergency’ that our political leaders have created to justify such laws as the Patriot Act and NDAA (and, I’m sure others, of similarly excessive control that have been created at state and local levels), which are nothing less than an affront to logic and sensibility, a slap in the face to our Constitution, and completely unnecessary by any reading of America’s fundamental principles and which I, if presented the opportunity, would strive to decry, defund, defeat, and destroy.

On the global front, we just need to cut our losses; lets bring our troops home and hope that we have not converted too many foreign nationals into enemies. We aren’t occupiers or imperialists; we’re not good at it and we should quit trying to run other countries affairs. This is nothing more than empire building, which failed in ancient Rome as it did, ultimately, with every other empire throughout history. It’s a devastating financial burden on the citizens of the United States. Today there are more than 900 American bases in over 130 countries. I would love to see our troops returned home where they would defend the borders of the United States instead; wouldn’t you?

Why do we need a standing army? To defend us from the enemies we have created over the last 40 years – enough to last the lifetimes of three generations by our aggressive policies – but I believe that it needs to be located HERE in the United States not in some foreign land. Sadly, our folly of intervening in the affairs of other sovereign nations has cost us thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and scarred more innocent lives than can be counted. You cannot go to war to make peace; it’s like borrowing money to get out of debt: you end up worse in the end.

One of the others things, more locally, I find odd is that our Senator, John McCain, is such a proponent of war and violence; one would think that someone who lived through what he did in Vietnam would fight tooth and nail to NOT be involved in military aggression. In 2005 he stated,

“Securing ever-increasing parts of Iraq and preventing the emergence of new terrorist safe havens will require more troops and money. It will take time, probably years, and mean more American casualties. Those are terrible prices to pay. But with the stakes so high, I believe we must choose the strategy with the best chance of success.”

We have no declared war, just an unnecessary and illegitimate state of emergency, yet Senator McCain said in a speech in 2008:

“…We have enemies for whom no attack is too cruel, and no innocent life safe, and who would, if they could, strike us with the world's most terrible weapons. There are states that support them, and which might help them acquire those weapons because they share with terrorists the same animating hatred for the West, and will not be placated by fresh appeals to the better angels of their nature. This is the central threat of our time, and we must understand the implications of our decisions on all manner of regional and global challenges could have for our success in defeating it.”

And In a recent interview where he was asked about his defense and foreign policy priorities, McCain said:

“First of all we have to, in my view, repeal, this so-called sequestration, which are these automatic cuts in defense spending as well as other spending. We’re decimating our military, and I get that from all our military leaders, it’s not just my personal opinion. The second thing we have to do is do everything we can to restore American leadership – that means to lead. In other words we have to have a robust policy to give the lesson, one, to Vladimir Putin that he can’t just move across Europe. And the second is that we have to defeat ISIS, the president says we have to defeat ISIS but he has no strategy to get there. So we will be working very hard to force a strategy to degrade and eventually defeat ISIS.”

With no real enemy attacking the United States, he would press to create or infer hostility among any that are not aligned and approved by the United Nations or corporate sponsors. He doesn’t believe in the Constitutional Republic that is the United States but is a proponent for rule by simple majority, which is the 51 telling the 49 what to do; which is nothing short of mob rule, also known as Democracy.

Since 2005, he has had one of the most aggressive stances against people that have brought no harm to the United States. His urging American occupation of foreign lands, and going to war with Iran, North Korea, Syria, Egypt, several African countries and soon Russia, is unprecedented and most be brought to an end. He claims to be a maverick, but it’s not so much as a Republican as an American that he’s out of step, as proved by his recklessness and desire to be a global interventionist.

In the end, he needs to be removed from office as much as our foreign policies need to change.