Where am I politically?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Tw, shut your yap. I checked Barnett back out of the library to continue my reading. When I'm ready, we'll speak on it.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Tw, shut your yap. I checked Barnett back out of the library to continue my reading. When I'm ready, we'll speak on it.

Urbane Guerilla has been so humiliated that he will now read Thomas Barnett's book. It's tough reading - too complex for UG. No wonder he put it down.

Well at least we now know UG is human. He just cried ouch. UG - I am just like the wife you will never have. I remember.

[Radar]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Now I'm beginning to see why you have such trouble with foreign policy, Radar. American soil and people can't be separated from American interests, nor disentangled from American investment. Isolationism of the description you imply you prefer here only worked when the fastest speed of communication was a sailing ship and when the Royal Navy so dominated the Atlantic that any other great European power had no hope of meddling in any development in the North American continent -- and after the middle nineteenth century, considerably less hope in South America, too.

Isolationism, I consider, is a nonstarter. It also greatly inhibits the creation of wealth, an idea very popular with Libertarians IIRC.



Shortchange Kuwait, an ally of ours, just like that, eh? Day-um. I'd say invading what was likely our best friend in the region would be sufficiently provocative, especially in view of American people and investment effort being inextricably united and in essence one. And of course there is the abuse the Kuwaiti population took -- typical of what happens when a non-democracy turns internationally coercive. More libertarian (democratic) societies discourage this; nondemocracies actively promote abuses, outrages, and mass robberies of one description or another.

Unprovoked, my Libertarian ass, Radar! The Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein violated the principle of self-ownership and the principle of non-aggression.

Have you ever been outside the borders of the United States?!



If you want libertarianism to happen anywhere, in any time before the sun goes into red giant phase and melts our Earth away, you'll drop this idea. To get libertarianism, antilibertarian regimes will have to be removed. It is not in the nature of such regimes to go quietly.

Remember, Paul: you're not the only man in the room. In politics, unlike in math, there is often more than one answer.

I don't support isolationism. I support free trade and good will with all nations. When American companies invest abroad, they accept the risks associated with that investment, and the U.S. military is NOT here to protect those investments, or other nations.

The trouble with unlibertarian ilk like you is you can't separate military non-interventionism from isolationism. I'd be willing to bet you I've been outside the U.S. far more than you.

Whether or not Saddam and Iraq were violating libertarianism or initiating force (which they weren't because they were using force in the defense of their property), is completely irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is whether or not they were using force against US!

[Undertoad]

Mr. Michael Lind talks about this topic in a current edition of bloggingheads.tv (don't click unless you enjoy watching an hour of nothing but political discussion)

I was so impressed by Lind's thoughts on this that I transcribed a bit:

LIND: I wrote The American Way of Strategy to defend what I think is the mainstream tradition of American internationalism that coalesed in the first half of the 20th Century and, underpins a lot of our strategy up until the end of the cold war.

This is not my theory; this is not M.L.'s theory of the world, this is not some kind of academic theory I'm promoting, I'm trying to excavate an existing tradition that you can trace back to Theodore Roosevelt, to Franklin Roosevelt, to Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Secy of State Robert Lansing, journalists like Walter Lippman. To sum up, the book explains what Woodrow Wilson meant when he said that the US and its allies must "make the world safe for Democracy". Wilson did not say the US and its allies must make the world Democratic, but safe for Democracy. And I explain what that means.

PINKERTON: That's an interesting point, because in Wilson's 14 Points, the word Democracy doesn't appear. He talks about national self-determination, but not Democracy. So when you say this, what did President Wilson have in mind as you articulate?

LIND: What is a world safe for Democracy? It's one in which the security costs imposed on the United States by the outside world are sufficiently low that the US can afford to have a liberal, Democratic/Republican system with separation of powers, with a civilian economy and so on.

It was the fear, both in WW1 and in WW2 and the years preceding, and also in the late 1940s/50s, that if Germany or the Soviet Union were allowed to become the dominant superpower in the world and to encircle us in the oceans, and in the Western hemisphere, we Americans would give up much of our Liberty and much of our Democracy... voluntarily.

That is, we were in no danger of being conquered by the Germans, and the Russians weren't going to occupy Minnesota or Kansas. What the Wilson administration and the interventionists in WW1, and Franklin Roosevelt and the cold war interventionists feared was -- and they said this explicitly, I quote it in my book -- it's seldom quoted nowadays, but this was the major argument for intervention in the world wars and the cold war. The fear was that the US would have to become a garrison state -- voluntarily.

That is, we would voluntarily cede a lot of our liberty to the government to be secure, we would voluntarily have enormous levels of defense spending in a world in which the dominant superpower were Germany or the Soviet Union.

So when politicians say that we intervened in the World Wars and the Cold War to defend our Liberty at home, I argue they're quite right, but what they need to say is, to defend our Liberty from our own government, which we would reluctantly but voluntarily turn into something of a militariized police state if we had to create a fortress America. And it was in order to avoid creating a fortress America that we nipped this trouble in the bud.

We never allowed Germany to consolidate its would-be Euro empire and its two atempts to conquer Europe. And we never allowed the Soviet Union to intimidate Western Europe and Japan into submission and to divide them from the US.

I think that's something that needs to be explained, because otherwise if you say, "American soldiers have fought and died abroad defending our Liberty", that just seems like cheap rhetoric if you think well, come on, the Kaiser wasn't going to conquer the United States, and the Soviets weren't going to invade California.

And THAT, Mr. Radar, is how WW1, WW2 and the Cold War threatened Liberty, and the real reason they had to be fought.

Similarly, some level of War on Terror has to be fought -- whether it's military, or police/intelligence -- partly because losing a WTC every five years (or whatever) is not an acceptable loss in our economy, but mostly because the country can't stand an ever-increasingly potent Patriot Act every five years.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Very well said, UT.

Tw, I'm man enough, if you're woman enough. But jayzus, you're the man with the smallest set of interpersonal skills and smarts I've ever known, and I've a fairly wide circle of acquaintances. Marrying two simultaneously would be pretty big'a'me, but there are legal hurdles to overcome...

[Radar]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Mr. Michael Lind talks about this topic in a current edition of bloggingheads.tv (don't click unless you enjoy watching an hour of nothing but political discussion)

I was so impressed by Lind's thoughts on this that I transcribed a bit:

And THAT, Mr. Radar, is how WW1, WW2 and the Cold War threatened Liberty, and the real reason they had to be fought.

Similarly, some level of War on Terror has to be fought -- whether it's military, or police/intelligence -- partly because losing a WTC every five years (or whatever) is not an acceptable loss in our economy, but mostly because the country can't stand an ever-increasingly potent Patriot Act every five years.

That Mr. Undertoad, this is less than a poor excuse to be involved in those wars, but topic at hand isn't those wars, it's America's unwarranted, unjustified, unprovoked, and unconstitutional involvement in Iraq that is both unAmerican, and unlibertarian.

The author's laughable premise is that if we didn't practice tyranny and military interventionism abroad, we'd have to do it at home. That's utterly ridiculous and the exact opposite is true. If we weren't going around the world making enemies, we wouldn't have to worry about attacks at home.

America's unwarranted military interventionism always has unpredictable, and unwanted consequences. It was America's involvement in WWI, that created the conditions that allowed Hitler to come to power and make WWII. It was because of WWII, that we had to develop nukes, and this led to the cold war. It was because of the cold war that we had the Korean war, and we armed and trained Osama Bin Laden, and put him on the CIA payroll. America put Noriega, Khadafi, Hussein, and Khomeni in power due to our meddling in the affairs of other nations.

If we mind our own damn business, we don't have to have a bloated, military creating empires and certainly wouldn't have to infringe on the liberties of Americans at home. Our freedoms are not up for grabs, and aren't for the government to take or even to decide upon.

UG, not only was what UT posted not "well said", it bordered on being retarded.