- People should make a distinction between someone being
anti-war and being anti-defense. The best way, as George Washington said,
to preserve the peace is to be prepared for war. The worst thing politicians
can do is to squander the nation's resources in unnecessary wars.
-
- Look at Vietnam. We know in retrospect that it doesn't
make one iota's difference to us that Vietnam is communist. American politicians
and businessmen have flocked to do business with the communists. Yet politicians
wasted 57,000 American lives presumably to prevent Vietnam from going communist.
Another 40,000 were wasted in Korea, as if the politics of the Korea peninsula
mattered to us one way or another. I hasten to add, of course, that in
both instances it matters a great deal to the Vietnamese and the Korean
people.
-
- But that's the point. They are Vietnamese and Koreans,
not Americans. Who governs their countries is up to them, not to us. God
did not put us on this earth to run around the globe deciding which government
is appropriate for which country. We are responsible for only one government
and one country - ours. We are not doing a very good job at taking care
of it, either. Our borders are being overrun, our natural resources are
being exploited, and our government is inefficient and corrupt.
-
- There is no need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It was designed to defend Europe against an invasion by the Soviet Union.
There is no Soviet Union. There is no reason whatsoever for 91,000 American
soldiers to be permanently stationed in Germany. There are no military
threats to Germany, or to any other European country. There are more people
in the European Union than there are in the United States. I imagine that
they would field whatever military forces they felt were necessary if we
quit being such a sucker as to "protect" people who don't need
any protection.
-
- There is no reason to keep 36,000 Americans in South
Korea or thousands more on the Japanese island of Okinawa. We have no legitimate
interest in the Far East except for trade, and military forces are not
required for trade. The only country in the Far East that is supposedly
an enemy is China, and we're trading with China like mad. Japan is the
second-largest economy in the world and can certainly defend itself. It
has a warlike tradition 3,000 years old, whereas ours is barely 400 years
old. Japan already spends more on its "self-defense" forces than
Great Britain and France combined.
-
- It might be of interest to know that at the end of World
War I, Great Britain's military planners figured the next war Great Britain
would have to fight would be against the United States. They saw Germany
as having been taken out of the picture, and they saw us as the only threat
to Great Britain's dominance. That historical tidbit is a reminder of the
wisdom of another thing George Washington said: There is no such thing
as friendship between nations. No nation can be trusted beyond its perceived
self-interest.
-
- The fact that American politicians today routinely refer
to this country or that one as "friend" is just more evidence
of our intellectual decline. We are powerful today because in the past
we've been lucky as hell, and because in the past we had leaders with brains
and backbones. We are spending the seed corn of the past, and the American
people need to wake up and find something more substantial to rely on than
dumb leaders and dumb luck.
-
- If I sound grumpy, it's because I am. If I wanted my
grandchildren to live in a Third World country, I would move them to one.
I have no desire whatsoever to stand silent while cheap politicians reduce
this, the greatest country in the world, to just another Third World has-been.
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- © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021223/index.php
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