Also much harsher than your thoughts

I go easy on the death and torture pronouncements since it’s rude to Book to keep going on about it at her blog. The regulars already know my sentiments on this score, and if they don’t, they can get it by reading Tom Kratman’s Caliphate and Carnifex.

This link expresses some of the same philosophy, but is much more concise. Also much harsher than your thoughts…but still…!

http://the-gathering-storm.blogspot.com/2008/02/winds-of-war-how-some-dealt-with.html

So were the Democrats against the US using military force to protect the rights of individuals? Yes, they were, when they controlled the South that is. But in Waco, they were definitely for it. In the Elian-Cuba case, they were definitely for it too. In Kosovo, they were for it. So either the Democrats are hypocrites, or they have gone back to their true and ancient roots.

We have seen historically that every system of government, empire, and military rule has fallen, oftentimes because of an internal defect giving way to external threats.

The problem was always, no nation was ever wealthy enough to pay for the welfare of its own citizens AND its military. So thus you could protect your people from bandits, but only by taxing them to death. You could lower the taxes and provide your people with wealth and roads and benefits, but then eventually the barbarians will be at the gates cause you cut back on your military spending.

America is at a curious situation in which she can both afford a military might unsurpassed while at the same time take care of her citizens and non-citizens too. That balance is not sustainable, though, since human beings are human beings. They want more than they are getting.

Europe, on the other hand, is in a similar situation, but they don’t have to pay for military expenditures because they are parasites upon the US military.

The question of affordability is important because classical liberals want to help people, but we also must recognize that there is no point to helping people if it is only temporary. If helping others means weakening ourselves to the point where we may be defeated, then who is going to help anybody after we are gone? What’s the point of building the Hagia Sophia and putting all that money and work into it, only to have the Muslims conquer it and call it their own because you put all the money that was going into the military, into public works and bribes to the steppe raiders? Justinian’s orders to Belisarius to reconquer the Western Roman Empire bankrupted the Eastern Roman Empire. So Justinian got a bunch of land in Italy and Europe in return for the Muslims taking over Egypt’s grain production and Syria. He lost loyal supporters in return for rebellious barbarians. That’s a nice trade, I suppose.

Whatever the idealism of a classical liberal, he must also face reality and accept the limitations that reality imposes upon human affairs. So it has come about, as a purely historical moment in time due to the actions of many factions, that the fate and destiny of a superpower is advanced, not by exploiting people and their resources, but by accepting them as equals and uplifting them further along the road to human ultimate potential.

Read this for an example of what I am writing of. Link

Amazingly, America is at a position in history where she can help herself… only by protecting and absorbing the nations and interests of other people. America cannot protect the borders and the trade lanes of the world just by herself. She needs other people, other allies. Most people forgot that Rome started off as one single nation state and gradually grew larger as they allied with fellow Italian city-states, which more and more benefited from the expansion of Roman citizen from one city, Rome, to all of Italy. Then to most of the known world.

There is nothing particularly wrong with a Democrat saying that America can’t go it alone. Except for the fact that a Democrat could not care less that human beings in this world requires the intervention of power, specifically American power. Democrats are not against using government power, meaning American power, to intervene in the lives of disadvantaged people and victims. The fact that Democrats care not for victims that don’t vote for them, is what is wrong. It is not wrong that they say folks need help, it is that they are only doing so in order to further their own personal ambitions. So why do you think Democrats care about people that can vote for Democrats here in America, and are willing to use military and government force to compel, force, and convince these people of the benefits to the Democrats’ better way of life, but won’t do it for the even more poor and disenfranchised in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan? Not to mention Vietnam.

Regardless of what answer you pick, the only thing that matters to classical liberals is that Democrats have no interest in helping people that will not benefit them politically. And what benefits Democrats politically, unfortunately, is creating dissension, strife, conflict, and violence between human beings. That’s not the goals of classical liberals. So while classical liberals have a vested interest in helping other people precisely because this also helps the classical liberal’s country, given that liberty equals prosperity and security equals liberty, Democrats do not. The Left does not and the fake liberals definitely do not.

Conservative isolationists also can find themselves politically allied with the Democrats on this issue precisely because isolationism requires that one remove oneself from foreign affairs. The cause of furthering perpetual war also, conveniently, requires that America be removed from foreign affairs.

The Left decries empires and exploiting people. The fact that they say nothing negative about Islam’s Empire is all that a classical liberal needs to know to determine the goals and motivations of the Left and their Democrat allies.

Human beings are motiviated by selfishness and personal interest, yes? If so, then if the Democrats truly believed that protecting and securing Iraqis, brown people, and Africans in Africa would help Democrats out politically, then you couldn’t scrape a Democrat off the issue of building an American Empire if you had CodePink blocking the only doorway in and out. But they are against an American Empire precisely because they know that only the Soviet Empire was just and worthy, and America was the enemies of the Soviets. Just as problems in WWI led to WWII and problems in WWII led to the cold war, so is that our problems in the Cold War have translated themselves to our problems in the here and now.

I remind you, Democrats are not against the principle of using American might to protect and intervene in people’s lives. That is not their excuse for not wanting to spread American power to Africa, the Middle East, etc. They might try to use it as an excuse, but it is not an excuse. It’s a lie. The real reason they aren’t interested in helping Iraqis is that Democrats have no personal nor altruistic reason for doing so.

And so that is how the chessboard is setup. We have one long term strategy of making America more powerful, secure, ethically correct, respected, and so forth. And then we have the plan of the Democrats, which as I have already illustrated, has nothing to do with helping human beings and everything to do with gaining power in their own political system.

Here’s an analogy to cut down all the issues. A family that has seen its children starve to death, dismembered, and their girls raped, will think what when they see Americans come in to offer aid, security, and prosperity in return for an oath of allegiance and loyalty? Will the family think “these colonial bastards are out to exploit us and put us back in the bad old days of the British Empire”? Or do only fake liberals think that? So who are the Democrats really benefit when they say that they are out to protect the sovereign rights of indigenous peoples and victims? The victims… or the Democrats?

Just because America has achieved a special place in history, does not mean we are immune from having to fight battles against Democrats and plans to flip the country upside down from its foundations. We are not invulnerable to invasion and the human condition, no matter how many Americans believe that they are safe from invasion. No human is safe from the effects of propaganda and psychological warfare, thus no human being is invulnerable to invasion, given that I don’t need to cross a national border to bend someone to my will.

Given their refusal to face reality on economics, why would we think that Democrats would face reality on diplomacy?

I hadn’t compared Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous ‘Peace In Our Time’ effort to what Obama might do. It hasn’t really concerned me that he would be willing to “talk” to dictactors and enemies.

But what if his idea of “talk” leads to the kind of appeasement practiced by Neville Chamberlain? What if Obama engages in not just talk, but in this kind of diplomatic weakness and surrender of all advantage? For tyrants and dictactors – predators – that would be like blood in the water.

Wars decide which nations get to survive and which get to go on bended knee for the crumbs of mercy.

The artificial world constructed by the Left, originally for the purpose of aiding the Soviets in fighting the cold war against America, is a house built upon sand. It is ridiculously easy to knock down precisely because it was never designed to stand up to anything harsh.

You think Code Pink and MoveOn could fight Al Qaeda and US forces hand to hand, eye to eye? That’s not what they are for.

In the grand scheme of things, there are materials made of plastic that will survive for thousands of years without decomposing and then there are materials made specifically to be disposed like disposable cups and forks. Amongst that spectrum, the US Constitution, US military, armed force, violence, and competency rests amongst the durable side. The anti-durable site consists of the tissue paper that is the Left. Designed to be used and then discarded. Members of the Left prefers recycling because they find a certain affinity with the process.

PS

Bush needs to work on telling an audience stuff that doesn’t immediately spell out what he means. He loses around 50% of the impact of his claims because he doesn’t make the audience make the connections themselves between what an oppressed person sees or doesn’t see about dictators talking to the United States. This is not explanation, so much as exposition.

It is woefully inferior to the rhetoric and oratory methods used in say… comedy. The whole point of rhetoric as a skillset is to get your audience thinking what you want them to be thinking. Bush would make a fine instructor, to a degree, but he cannot convince people with just claims that oppressed people prefer not to have the US President meet with dictators.

A nice little challenge Bush can do to avoid meeting with dictators is to say, in public and very often, that he will meet with dictators if they release 500 political prisoners that America has chosen from a list that the dictator must provide America.

Diplomacy is always, if you are talking about professional and competent diplomacy, about ensuring that your opponent is caught in a catch 22. This way, you win either way. Instead of expending time and resources trying to justify why you’re not meeting with dictators, say that you will, but only if you are given more power. And that is what it is when dictators give you a list of people they have arrested for political reasons. Now you get to decide who becomes free or not, providing both international as well as local prestige and influence beyond what you could achieve with the incompetent State Department or military force/sanctions.

And if they refuse or release only 1 or 5, then you reply, “since you only completed 10 to 5% of the requirements for a meeting, you get only 5% of the time you would have gotten had you completed the requirements”.

There’s a lot of different themes and methods you could try. You could try the intimidation game and say that you cannot guarantee the safety of anybody from Iran or Cuba if they arrive in the US. Without diplomatic immunity, their spies will not exactly be all that eager to fund propaganda operations about how you are the one refusing to negotiate and “talk”. You’re not refusing to talk, you’re just saying that if you don’t like what Castro says, Castro may not leave the meeting alive. That’s a very simple thing in politics.

Another flavor is extortion. Demand money from dictators for attending a meeting with the United States, given that lobbyists pay money and so do people who retain lawyers for advice and paid consultants. Why shouldn’t dictators pay millions for each meeting, given that they will be given access to decision makers that can exterminate whole peoples and nations if the dictator’s requests are granted?