Southern Avenger

Even though it is often said that 'war is the health of the state' it is none the less true. The real irony is that the Democrats show themselves to have the same infatuation with war as the Republicans. Democrats are only against war when it is a Republican war.

Sadly wars are seldom ended by good sense prevailing. Eventually exhaustion sets in, and when this happens the fighting just grinds to a halt. Many will suffer and die before this can happen.

My guess is that America will soon get distracted by other conflicts and Afghanistan will be forgotten about.

Indeed, Jack, there is nothing "conservative" about perpetual warfare.

there should be a law that you can only declare war if you have served in one Bush and his gang of draft dogers started this. it sickens me to listen to cheaney wigh all his deferments talk about loving country and service.

It's Bush's war. Obama has only failed to stop it.

Give it a break. Do any of you "head in the sand" types remember 9/11, or are you so short sighted as most americans are. We are at war, maybe not declared as it should be, but we ARE AT WAR.

I agree with osterj! I think we'll be at war, well, probably forever, that is as long as this country is free and prosporous and someone wants us not be (like Obama). Not happening in this thug, deceiptful, lying, behind closed doors administration. And the war is not the most expensive biggest program of the federal government Mr. Southern Avenger. Add up all the "liberal dems" hand out programs and you would have your answer. And it seems they are balls to the wall on ramming another one down our throats!

Sorry, osterj and jonniev, to disagree with you but... No. We are not at War; We are at "Nation Building". We are at the business of fulfilling the desire of the neo-conservatives (Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Cheney, Bush I & II) to remake the world into a collection of socialist democratic states that are controlled and directed by the US and Western Europe political elite. The distinction can be hard to see since they both involve the use of troops, but let's see if we can break it down in Jeff Foxworthy style...

If you are spending more on improvement projects, relief, and political bribery than on bombs and bullets, you might be "Nation Building".

If there are as many bureaucrats and civilian contractors in the theater of operations as there are troops, then you might be "Nation Building".

If a description of what winning looks like cannot be made using more than a couple of sentences, you might be "Nation Building".

If the definition of who is the enemy changes during the campaign, you might be "Nation Building".

If you expand operations into other nation states using the pretext of a violation of some UN resolution, you might be "Nation Building".

If after almost a decade after 9/11 and after a trillion or two has been spent, the mighty US Government has still failed to bring the declared mastermind Osama bin Laden to justice, you might be "Nation Building".

I could go on all day, but then I'd hate for you to miss getting your marching orders from Hannity and Levin and I really need to get back to sticking my "head in the sand".

Government always say that the wars they wish to prosecute are for self defence. This is certainly not always the case. The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened yet it was the pretext for a terrible war in Vietnam. At the time people used the same rhetoric as they do now. They said we 'had to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here'. Well the Vietnan war was lost by the USA and what where the consequences for America - nothing.

Similarly Iraq was invaded because of weapons of mass destruction. Again a pretext which was false. People should ask themselves what Saddam Hussein could have done to prevent this war. Could he have done what Bush demanded and destroy his WMD and show them being destroyed on TV? Well no he couldn't because these weapons did not exist.

Now you have the war in Afghanistan. But does America know who they are fighting? They are told lots of things but how much is true? Well they are fighting the Pashtun tribe who are in a civil war with the tribes from Northern Afghanistan. Even that is probably not the whole explanation.

The Pashtuns themselves are divided geographically by the Pakistan boarder. Do you know who drew the boarder? It was the British. They left a boarder which divided a people into two parts. This is not an untypical colonial legacy.

Any of you conservatives care to address how some of this warfare is the result of the free market's desire to gain a foothold in the middle east?

How the free market has been allowed to hollow out the federal government and replace it with contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-sub-sub-contractors that do everything that soldiers used to do?

How can you reconcile wanting to reign in the American "empire" when you are not willing to enact legislation to reign in the corporations who not only fight the wars but also get paid to clean up after, bandage the wounds and then do it all again?

Mat you confuse the free market with corporatism. The ills of which you write are more repulsive to us than they are to you. Remember that in a free market no one get any favours from government. What you describe is the military industrial complex. This is every bodies enemy.

Matt. I'm don't consider myself a conservative, but I'll take a crack at explaining it from a libertarian perspective.

What you are describing is not the free market, where there is a voluntary exchange that is mutually beneficial for both parties. Rather, what you are describing is the political marketplace, where corporations, lobbyists, and politicians conspire to steal from the public for their mutual enrichment under the guise of progressive rhetoric. The mercantilist scenario that you describe has absolutely no elements of voluntary exchange in it since it is driven by revenue streams that originate from political theft in the form of taxation and inflation. I think that its safe to assume that without government compulsion, neither of us would be paying the Xe Corporation for their services in the Middle East.

Leftist make a career out of pointing to the American corporatist/mercantilism system and saying "see how bad free markets are." The problem with this is that there are very few economic activities that take place in the US where the government doesn't have their hand in it through regulation, taxation, incentivization, subsidization, and military expansion. All of which are in fact products of progressivism. What they find themselves railing against are actually the by-product of the type of top-down imposition of government control (always done using egalitarianist rhetoric) that themselves are all hot for. The ghosts of FDR, Wilson, Truman, LBJ, Teddy Roosevelt, Hoover, and Lincoln continue to haunt us today. If you are really looking for examples of free markets in America then you are reduced to having to settle for the classified ads and garage sales.

If you really care about accuracy in your bashing of “free markets”, then I suggest that you spend a little time studying Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard to get your mind right about what one is and isn't. We all suffer from a 100+ years of misinformation on this topic.

I'll have to leave it to a real "conservative" to give you the philosophical defense of their support for the Wilsonian-progressive policy of "spreading of democracy to make the world safer" that we are engaged in over there. However, as for taking up your challenge to defend the "free market", I really don't see how your average red-state conservative Republican can do that.

Good Show Westerly, people like Mat are o plenty and need to be unplugged from the matrix.

westerly, I'll grant you that by definition these aren't "free market" activities going on and I'll even grant you that the ideas about "free markets" have been abused over the years, much the same way that the ideas of socialism and communism were abused in various settings in the last century.

However, you still more or less failed to address the direct question in my post, which is: are you willing to put aside the "free market" arguments long enough to reign in the corporatist machine that has created and sustains this war?

On the left, there is a similar issue about trusting the state to provide for people until the state is no longer relevant (which was a part of Marx's thought). Naturally, this never sat well with the Communists once they took power. Imagine that.

At any rate, I cannot reconcile the "free market" with any sort of concept that is workable or even desirable in the real world - much as I am certain that there won't be any sort of leftist version of the anarcho-syndicalist world anytime in my lifetime, if ever. It hinges entirely too much on the collapse of a system which has slowly grown and evolved over the course of hundreds of years and also the possibility that all people could possibly become creatures of rational self-interest.

So, we're back to the big issue. Left to their own devices in a free market, will these companies stop acting on imperial impulses that feed their own insatiable urges for profit? Or is it necessary to empower the state by reversing the decades old trend of privatizing government activities (including warfare) and dismantle the machinery of perpetual war and profit?

Personally, I'm for the latter. I don't believe for a moment that unleashing corporations will suddenly make them aware of any sort of rational self-interest.

When the enemy tells us why they hate us and why they will attack, LISTEN! The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.
America should not be Israel’s pit-bull, we are bankrupting our country with this war in the middle east. The neocon noise machine wants you to do anything but focus on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and soon to Iran. It’s not about healthcare or Cap and Trade, even immigration those are distractions from the real issue that is fiscally destroying our country. Turn off the noise and focus on what really matters, Bring our troops home NOW.

Regardless of the half-truths iterated by various posters here, President Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan.

The Bush exit strategy in Iraq was put in place long before Obama took office, so again, nice try, but Obama has done little but to continue Bush era policies.

Trying to make these wars only Republican is ridiculous. To state we were lied to misses the point - the Iraq war was an over-reaction to an attack on our soil. Democrats beat the war drum as loudly and fervently as any Republican. There is ample evidence of this even before the 9/11 attack.

This ridiculous 1-party hate is beyond old - our Federal Government is clearly out of control and has been for decades and has spent us into near 3rd world status. Both of our parties are to blame, as our we for allowing this multi-generational theft.

Change sometimes only comes through tragedy - and our tragedy has only begun.