If I Were President -Part I

War mongers strike first, then try to justify later. Hitler attacked Poland in 1939 and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 under this premise. Decades later, America’s fear of communism created an environment that allowed LBJ to use the Gulf of Tonkin incident (later proved false) as an excuse to escalate military action in Vietnam. Governments use fear of “inevitable” war as an excuse to justify “preemptive” strikes.

Likewise, Bush and the Neo-cons made up the false threat of WMDs in Iraq as an excuse to create a preemptive strike on Saddam. The Neo-cons used our anger over 9/11 and the fear of inevitable war with terrorism to convince (or at least, confuse) us that it was justifiable. We the people (or should I say “sheeple”) allowed it to happen. We elected spineless politicians into congress. They, Democrat and Republican alike, rewarded us by shunning their responsibility (only they have the power to declare war) and handed over unlimited power to the Presidency, thus moving us closer to becoming a democratic dictatorship.

We should not be in Iraq. We never should have attacked Iraq in the first place. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mandate the United States to be the world’s policeman. Yet, that is what we have allowed the Neo-cons to make us.

For all the lip service, I have no faith the Democrats will be any different. After all, they were the ones who got us into Vietnam. Big government philosophies love military actions because it gives the government more power. In this way Neo-cons and Liberals the same. They both love big government and they both want the government to have more power, albeit for different reasons.

Against common sense, governments always turn to military might to try and spread their influence. Yet, we know on the most basic of levels that the real way to influence others is through engaging them in other ways. The free flow of trade, ideas and interactions create a bond that make it difficult for governments to convince us that we should be killing each other. You have to look no further than China and present-day Vietnam to see that this works.

Many people confuse the Libertarian stance that we should follow our Founding Fathers’ advice to stay out of the entanglements created by foreign alliances and military adventurism as “isolationist”. We are not. We are “noninterventionalists”. Big difference.

Big government’s approach to attack first, ask questions later has made us more isolated, not stronger. Common sense should tell us that we gain more influence by creating friends than by isolating ourselves through arrogant, mindless unilateral military action.

Our military was created to protect us, but, instead our government has used it to build an empire and take away our rights under the guise of “protecting” us. It is arrogant to think our military bases all over the world make us safer. How would you feel if Russia or China had military bases here? And how would that make them safer? It would just make us despise them.

Ironically, because of our choice to base our foreign policy on military strength, we are now weaker, not stronger. Our influence in the world, our military resources, our economy at home and our moral authority have all been significantly diminished. Just as importantly, the blow-back of our military adventurism will be creating unpredictable consequences for years to come.

America should stop reacting to the world based on anger and fear. And our military strength should only be used when we are attacked, not as a tool for ideologues to spread their perverted versions of “freedom”. America’s ability to spread real freedom can’t be achieved through the barrel of a gun, but through the shining example of who we once were. Let us hope that we as Americans can learn to stop isolating ourselves through our military actions and can start engaging the world in more positive ways through the noninterventionalist approach our Founding Fathers envisioned.

If I were President, I would concentrate on making our nation stronger by returning the military to it’s role as protector of American interests and away from it’s current role as empire builder for whichever ideologues that happen to hold power. I would also work to rescind all acts the government has used to take away American individual rights in the name of “protecting” us, such as The Patriot Act. And finally, I would strive to return the power of declaring war back where it belongs, with congress.

Silly ideas, I know, but I can dream can’t I?