| | Mark I'm not even sure if it's worthwhile to even respond to you as you hold premises in contradiction to mine. Given that you will probably stubbornly hold on to those false premises no matter how persuasive an argument I present, I do this for the benefit of third party observers who may find some value in what I write.
Mark wrote:
John, you state that a foreign policy of non-intervention is "suicidal", in one post, and "pacifist" in another. But refraining from wrongly killing at least 150,000 Iraqi's (the most recent estimate of death loss since our invasion) is hardly a pacifist policy! A nation can hold to a policy of defending itself from attack, or of retaliating to an attack, without waging killing wars against people who had done neither.
The argument you present is that it is wrong to kill people who were not the initiators of force (at least it's wrong to do so intentionally). I completely agree. The response to the initiation of force must be appropriate and fit the crime. For example we wouldn't think it just to nuke an entire nation for state sponsored terrorism, but rather a more appropriate response would be a military strike or a conventional invasion to dismantle the state government that sponsored that terrorism. Of course what force is appropriate is entirely dependent upon the context of the situation, maybe in a scenario we haven't seen yet nukes are necessary.
You then imply that because some Iraqi civilians have died through collateral damage (meaning unintentional deaths) that it should mean it was inappropriate to take a military action. So the premise here is, take appropriate military action in response to an initiation of force, but don't do so if some civilians may die from unintentional consequences of taking a military act. Another words we take the position of Pacifism. Since it is impossible to always avoid collateral damage, the only logical response is to have our military sit idle, effectively making them moot and consequently adopting a de facto pacifist position.
So lastly, you say it is appropriate to respond to an attack. But what attack? Is there a range of attacks to respond to? What about an attack on our trading partner whom through our business relationship we depend our livelihood on? What about an attack on an international trading route or more generally our property, i.e. the things that make living possible? What about a reasonable assessment of a threat of attack? Should we have to wait until the bullets are whizzing past our heads before we shoot back? What if the attacker has attacked everyone around us, and ceased their property, making it all that much more effective for them to mount an attack against us, is it immoral to use military action in response before it gets that far? According to you it is immoral unless there is an outright invasion from a nation on American soil. Another words, you take a position on morality to mean you prefer suicide to be the moral high ground.
Hence I stand by my accusation you and the Ron Paul fanboys prefer a suicidal, pacifist approach to foreign policy, i.e. one that does not serve our rational long-term interests but is instead in service to thugs and tyrants, or as Rand called them the "destroyers".
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