Bill, I am trying hard to grasp how smart, reasonable people are coming to this position that you are advocating. I just can't get there. The logic of it escapes me. More importantly, what escapes me is how anyone would thing that seeing all things as war helps solve the problem that we face. Problems, which by the way, compared to being at war, are really quite small. But then anyone living in a nation truly at war would quickly point that out. When one is truly at war, one knows it, and there is no debate.
How can you declare that "peace is not messy"? When has peace ever not been messy?? Far more Americans died at the hands of the Comanche in our own gray zone effort to wrest the Southern plains away from native Americans than AQ has ever killed. And far more viscously to boot. ISIL looks like a bunch of school girls compared to the Apache, yet we battled them primarily with civilians as well. In the first half of the last century we beat up on every weaker place we could reach out to where we thought there was a military interest to serve, or profits to be made; and don't even start on all the coups and revolutions we either fomented or attempted to block as the bloody back story to our Cold War containment of the Soviets. Peace is messy.
As to what our opponents love? AQ had to love it when we declared war on a tactic and went absolutely bat#### crazy, invading countries to topple dictators on one hand, and wrecking all manner of chaos in a dozen other countries to keep our protected dictators in power. American influence plummeted, and AQ influence soared on our confused quest to declare peace to be war and treat it as such.
We are lost as a nation. We have been treating peace as war for so long that we can't simply accept the reality of our situation. We are incredibly secure as a nation. Our security is the envy of nearly everyone else, yet we squander it with Quixotic expeditions in hot pursuit of noises in the dark.
George Washington had it largely right in his farewell address. An address as valid now as it was the day he penned it. We were never an isolationist nation, but were always a maritime nation dedicated to the pursuit of global commerce. We need to get back to the principles and perspectives we were founded upon. There will always be Kings and Pirates who violate the rights of others to advance their own selfish ends. Sometimes that will be our business and demand our firm response - but mostly it is business we do not make better by putting our noses in.
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