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| The Iraq thing | | Date Created: Feb 17, 2005, 10:21 PM |
Here's a summary of the points regarding the Iraq question.
-Terrorists and terror attacks on the US is a real problem, not a PC (i.e. made up)problem.
-The US government was specifically set up to provide for the common defense. That's one of its few legitimate roles.
-It matters not, ultimately, what France and Germany and other countries think. We're talking about the interests of the US.
-The UN is a perfect example of everything wrong with Big Government. It's even bigger and less effective at running the world than a central command government or a government run economy is in its own country. Relying on the UN is pure wishful thinking.
-The anti-Bush Democrats are just that. It doesn't matter what they said before, what's the best thing to do, or whether it's good for the country. If Bush is for it, they're against it to the point of what many would consider treasonous statements.
-A preemptive strike to take out a dangerous regime in Iraq was similar to the one in Afghanistan which didn't seem to generate nearly the uproar as in Iraq. Was taking out the Taliban not close enough to the election?
-Such military action is relatively unprecedented, but it's like prophylactic surgery (such as removing an organ before it develops cancer because it was judged to be highly premalignant). The experience (and I know it well) is that you never know if you did the right thing. The patient is rarely grateful because they still think they would never have gotten the cancer. And there can be problems and complications that weren't anticipated.
-The US military is great at doing its job (war), but not at doing what we don't allow in our own country which is to use soldiers as civilian police.
-But the real problem is that tearing down a country requires building it back up and if you think a government can build and run a country, you're a sadly deluded liberal or a Big Government Republican. It doesn't even work in our own country let alone a foreign one. Countries have to build themselves, and this requires the stability of property rights, free trade, fair protection under stable law etc. Japan did this easily after WWII but it was a much tougher go in Europe because of government meddling (Soviet in particular but also US welfare programs).
-We will likely never know if Bush made the right call in taking over Iraq and it will be hard to know when we've rebuilt the country and can turn it back over to them because the US government can't actually build a country. It's possible it was worth it, but how would you decide?
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