Libertarianism and Conservatism vs. Liberalism and Progressivism

If we were truly Libertarian, we'd never have propped up dictators all over the place. Our choice could be to bring the troops home and leave Saddam there to torture his people or to take him out. The former fosters a lot of hatred against the US (dangerous to us) and there's nothing Libertarian about foisting a dictator on people. The people should determine their own fate.

Make sense?

 

My priority is to bring the troops home and not intervene in other countries' affairs. However, we owe the Iraqis (and many other nations) some sort of reparations for the damages done under Wilsonian Diplomacy for about a century. The question then becomes what form do those reparations take?

Like I wrote before, we could just bring the troops home. That would leave it up to the Iraqis to try to overthrow a brutal dictator armed with WMDs that he's known to have used against his own people. That would be blood on our hands.

The reparations clearly had to be our blood and treasure.

The nation building thing? Was never into it, though once the decision was made, my options were to oppose it or hope for the best. I chose the latter.

People tried to bring up ridiculous figures about how many Iraqis died since 2003. The true number is about 100K, 10K that were soldiers in Saddam's army that we killed in the first 3 weeks, and almost all the rest were arabs killing arabs. What I didn't write (this time) was that International Law does put the lives and safety of those others who were killed in our hands, and the 100K figure is indicative of significant failure on our part.

Clear?

 

What can we possibly do to undo all the bullshit we've done since those pre-FDR days? Give me a better solution than what I've proposed? In the mean time, big government should be dismantled at as appropriate a pace as possible. People who've come to rely on certain handouts will likely need to be grandfathered in. It took decades to build the monster, it will take decades to unwind it all.

Now you can prove me a Republican or Conservative or whatever:

1) I've argued with the likes of maxiep, BrianFromWA, and Maris (among others) about having open borders. I don't know of any republican who favors open borders.
2) I'm pro-choice - not many republicans that are. Pro-life is written into the GOP party platform. No thanks.
3) I'm pro-union under the right circumstances. My only two issues with them are that association with one needs to be free, and there should not be public sector unions. Collective bargaining is fine.
4) I'm for legalization of drugs. I don't know a republican who favors it.
5) I'm for legalization of prostitution. I don't know a republican who favors it.
6) I'm for affirmative action.
7) I've not once spoken out against any of Obama's appointees to the supreme court.
8) My posts have been consistently opposed to expanding government, for elimination or reduction of govt. services, and for fiscal sanity.

 

Mission accomplished, remember that? Bush made that speech after Saddam's military was defeated and his government taken out. That's the mission I supported. Three weeks, and we should have left the Iraqis to sort out their own affairs.

Big difference between supporting anything beyond that. The "sort out their own affairs" is Libertarian, or you tell me what it is.

 

You express the quandary, but you don't acknowledge it.

Removing a dictator is indeed interventionist. We should not have supported him in the first place.

What do we do about the 2nd sentence above? Is it Libertarian to create dictators and empower them and then not intervene? The intervention was done a long time ago.

I presented the two options and explained my reasoning. The intervention was done a long time ago, we owe reparations, etc.

I've posted against GHW Bush quite a few times - that he encouraged the Iraqi people to revolt against Saddam (after Gulf War I) and they expected military support from us. When that military support did not appear, Saddam was free to slaughter 300,000 people. How do we make it up to the people there who lost family members to Saddam's brutality?

If you can come up with a better form of reparations than taking out the dictator we propped up and leaving the people to form their own government and society in their own vision, feel free.

 

You can't "not intervene" if you already have.

Just because we draw this line in the sand doesn't mean the people we've harmed are going to forgive and forget.

 

So according to the Denny Manifesto, we are committed to continue to intervene everywhere we ever have before - Kosovo, Nicaragua, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, all of Europe, Japan, Grenada, Southeast Asia, Korea, etc etc etc, until everything in those places is peaches and cream and all the children are smiling?

That's a heck of a non-interventionist policy you have there.

What makes you think future interventions in a given country are going to work out any better than past interventions in that country?

barfo

 

Previous interventions have been in the USA's interest at the expense of civilians of many countries. I propose undoing such interventions.

If Kosovo is run by a dictator we put in place who's murdering his people by the hundreds of thousands, then yes, we have a moral obligation to undo what we did. I don't see the issue in Nicaragua, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Europe, Japan, Grenada, Southeast Asia, Korea, etc.

I don't at all suggest we take out any despot anywhere. Nor did I say that we stay until all things are peaches and cream or whatever.

Interesting that you mention Iran. Jimmy Carter did the opposite of what I suggest, the people rebelled, they took US citizens hostage for 444 days, and what followed is 30+ years of hostile relations between the two countries.

I've already given one example of our intervention in Iraq (GHW Bush). We gave Saddam satellite intel that enabled him to defeat Iran in the Iraq-Iran war. When we had the chance to take him out in Gulf War I, we didn't. We instituted no-fly zones so Saddam could stay in power. We put sanctions on Iraq that allowed Saddam to spend revenue from oil sales to anything but food and medicine for his people, and he stayed in power. According to the Riegle report, we sold Saddam the material to create some terrible biological WMDs.

I had no expectation that we'd take out Saddam and all would be peaches and cream after 3 weeks when we should have left. Building a democracy or a communist state is a bloody and drawn out process, but at least the people would be vested by their own interests and enabled to sort it out.

 

Maris, you're simply wrong.


WikiLeaks Lances Lancet’s 2006 Pre-Midterm Elections Iraq Civilian Casualties Claim


And:

WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results

By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

 

You can't undo such things without a time machine. You can only meddle more.

Wow, that's an insanely biased view. Yes, Jimmy Carter (as a young naval officer) put the Shah in power in the early 50's and propped him up for 25 years before the revolution.

That seems, shall we say, a little naive. Had we pulled out after 3 weeks it is very likely that forces other than "the people" would have sorted it out.

barfo

 

Now you're guessing about what would have happened. Whatever happened, the people would have been enabled to stand against whatever bogeyman you are dreaming up.

Saddam was captured in December. We could have captured him sooner if we weren't so focused on trying to control the whole country militarily.

We couldn't undo FDR's internment of 100,000+ Japanese Americans, but we could pay reparations - and did.

I'm not talking about undoing what we had done, but reparations.

Hey, how about that PBS!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/carter-hostage-crisis/

Fast forward to New Years Eve, 1977: President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him "an island of stability" in the troubled Middle East. What the president also knew, but chose to ignore, was that the Shah was in serious trouble. As opposition to his government mounted, he had allowed his secret police, SAVAK, to crack down on dissenters, fueling still more resentment. Within weeks of Carter's visit, a series of protests broke out in the religious city of Qom, denouncing the Shah's regime as "anti-Islamic." The popular movement against the Shah grew until January 16, 1979, when he fled to Egypt. Two weeks later, thousands of Muslims cheered Khomeini's return to Iran after fourteen years in exile.

Did the Carter administration "lose" Iran, as some have suggested? Gaddis Smith might have put it best: "President Carter inherited an impossible situation -- and he and his advisers made the worst of it." Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences.

Even after it became known that the Shah was suffering from cancer, President Carter was reluctant to allow him entry to the United States, for fear of reprisal against Americans still in Iran. But in October, when the severity of the Shah's illness became known, Carter relented on humanitarian grounds. "He went around the room, and most of us said, 'Let him in.'" recalls Vice President Walter Mondale. "And he said, 'And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?' And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did."

When students overran the embassy and seized more than sixty Americans on November 4, it was not at all clear who they represented or what they hoped to achieve. In fact, a similar mob had briefly done the same thing nine months earlier, holding the American ambassador hostage for a few hours before members of Khomeini's retinue ordered him released. But this time, Khomeini saw a chance to consolidate his power around a potent symbol, and issued a statement in support of the action against the American "den of spies." The students vowed not to release the Americans until the U.S. returned the Shah for trial, along with billions of dollars they claimed he had stolen from the Iranian people.