United Liberty

Over the past few weeks I have had quite a few conversations with Conservatives which have led to a debate about interventionist versus non-interventionist foreign policy.  It usually starts with them attacking Ron Paul for one reason or another (check out this article on Midwest Spin for an example).  After I respond and question their criticism, it usually ends up being their disagreement with his foreign policy.

Foreign policy can be a very complex topic. I think that non-interventionists, for the most part, know why they support that policy much better than your typical interventionist. Many interventionists do not even understand the difference between non-intervention and isolationist.

If you support non-intervention you either have found yourself in a debate and had to defend non-intervention, or you will find yourself in one sometime in the near future. I have found there are a few things to keep in mind when you are in these debates:

1) Be ready to explain the difference between non-interventionism and isolationism. Isolationism is the foreign policy of North Korea. Non-intervention involves open dialogue, free trade, and minding your own business overseas. Two vastly different approaches. Just because you don’t support having a global military empire does not mean you are an isolationist.

2) Know some facts and figures. The United States has over 700 permanent military bases spread out across over 100 nations. Roughly 20% of the federal budget is military expenditures. There are facts and figures that give proof that 1) our military expenditures are financially unsustainable and 2) we most certainly have a foreign policy of intervention and global imperialism.

The latest controversy of the day among many on the right, led principally by Liz Cheney and William Kristol, involves attacking Justice Department lawyers who represented alleged members of al Qaeda or the Taliban detained at Guantanmo Bay.

As Kristol puts it:

[L]awyers now at the DOJ worked on the historic Boumediene case. That case established the Gitmo detainees’ right to challenge their detention in habeas corpus hearings. In effect, the habeas proceedings have taken sensitive national security and detention questions out of the hands of experienced military and intelligence personnel, and put them into the hands of federal judges with no counterterrorism training or expertise. That lack of experience shows. For example, in one recent decision a federal judge compared al Qaeda’s secure safe houses (where training, plotting and other nefarious activities occur) to “youth hostels.” The habeas decisions are filled with errors of omission, fact, and logic.

Still other lawyers did work on behalf of these well known terrorists: Jose Padilla (an al Qaeda operative dispatched by senior al Qaeda terrorists to launch attacks inside America in 2002), John Walker Lindh (the American Taliban), and Saleh al Marri (who 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent to America on September 10, 2001 in anticipation of committing future attacks).

Now, we don’t know what assignments these lawyers have taken on inside government. But we do know that they openly opposed the American government for years, on behalf of al Qaeda terrorists, and their objections frequently went beyond rational, principled criticisms of detainee policy.

President Obama’s recruitment of Presidents Clinton and Bush to help in the process of raising funds for relief in Haiti brought to mind memories of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Back then, President Bush recruited his father and President Clinton to take up a similar task.

At the time, the US response was certainly adequate, at least. Criticism was present, as President Bush couldn’t do much of anything without inciting outrage from someone, but the US response was robust and focussed just as the response to Haiti’s earthquake is.

However, when Hurricane Katrina hit, the US government seemed as if it didn’t care. For some reason, the undeniably horrible, delayed response by the Bush administration to Katrina has been compared to Obama’s Haiti. A more appropriate comparison would be comparing Katrina to the recent Ft. Hood and attempted Detroit attacks, in which the government which is there primarily to protect us seemed as bumbling and disconnected as it did under President Bush after Katrina.

That comparison leads to an important point, which is that the United States government and military seems better able to respond to disasters overseas than it is in its own country. This is undeniably a result of countless foreign wars and of being the world’s foremost superpower. We have military personnel at the ready to respond in Port au Prince, Kabul, Baghdad and Okinawa, but not on our very own shores.

It’s the last day of 2009. We made it through a crazy year that saw liberty put at risk on an all to regular basis. We decided the best way to recap the year was to take ten of 2009’s biggest stories and write a blurb about each one of them (we tried to keep it short and to the point).

Before you continue on, each of us here at UL want to thank you for a great 2009. We appreciate you reading. We’re planning for world domination in 2010 and hope that you’ll join in the fun.

So, here they are in no particular order, United Liberty’s Top 10 Stories from 2009.

Tea Party Movement (Brett Bittner): The wave of “hope” and “change” that swept Barack Obama into the Presidency of the United States closed out 2008 and opened the door to a new movement in American politics, the Tea Party movement.  I believe that his election was merely a catalyst for many groups of a conservative nature and strong views on limited government to unite to form one voice to stand up to the political status quo, calling out Democrats and Republicans alike for their affinity to grow the size of government to a breaking point.

We’re not live-blogging it , but we followed President Barack Obama’s speech last night announcing that 30,000 more troops will be heading to Afghanistan with a withdrawal of those troops beginning in 2011:

In a speech meant to mark the beginning of the end of the eight-year conflict, Obama made the case that the future of Afghanistan is not only an American security concern at home, but an international threat – and that the added U.S. commitment will be joined by greater contributions from NATO and other allies.

 

“Now, we must come together to end this war successfully,” Obama said, according to prepared remarks released by the White House.

 

Obama’s decision escalates the United States’ commitment in Afghanistan to nearly 100,000 troops at a time when many Americans no longer believe the war is worth fighting. But by setting a date that marks the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement there, Obama hopes to ease concerns among the public about a protracted involvement in the conflict.

 

“The 30,000 additional troops that I am announcing tonight will deploy in the first part of 2010 – the fastest pace possible – so that they can target the insurgency and secure key population centers,” Obama said. “They will increase our ability to train competent Afghan Security Forces, and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

Obviously a protracted American presence isn’t an option in Iraq, based alone on the unpopularity of such a presence with just about everybody involved. However, the absence of the United States will lead to a power vaccuum, even if a supposedly stable parliamentary state with a professionally trained military is left behind. A post-American occupation Iraq will not be gumdrops and lollipops, since it wasn’t gumdrops and lollipops before the 2003 invasion either.

It’s not surprising that attacks are being increased as we lead up to American withdrawal from Iraq. Terrorists must see an opportunity here, with a major power leaving behind a strategically important Middle Eastern state, and it is most likely that they will take full advantage of it. The optimistic view would be that the military trained by US forces would be adept enough to put down an insurgency. The pessimistic view is that they’re not, and then we’ll see a Taliban situation in an oil-rich, strategically important Middle Eastern state that thousands of Americans and possibly millions of Iraqis have already died fighting for.

Though I don’t always agree with Andrew Sullivan, his letter to George W. Bush in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly carries a moral force to be reckoned with. Andrew does not re-neg on his support for the war on terror or the Iraq war, yet he manages to convey the destructiveness of the Bush administration’s policies to the US Constitution and the American national honor. There. I said it— “national honor”. Because national honor is exactly what our country lacked when Bush and his cohorts left office.

Though “national honor” is the kind of term that raises red flags for me, reading Andrew’s letter left me famished with a hunger for national honor, for something like the moral integrity at the heart of the American struggle to be (and hopefully to remain) “the land of freedom and opportunity”.

Though I do not agree with Andrew’s arguments for the war in Iraq, I am moved by the intellectual integrity which led him to write this article cum letter. Since the letter is by no means a postcard, I’ve excerpted the sections which I found to be most compelling, but it deserves to be read in its entirety. Andrew begins by situating himself in a moral context— the context for which he believes war is just and necessary.

The unrest in Honduras has been a topic in the news in the United States over the last few days (UL’s own Matt Wittlief explained the situation a few days ago), as President Barack Obama has voiced support for Manuel Zelaya’s return as president.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation in Honduras which evolved this week. If you have not heard, there is political unrest due to an alleged coup d’etat in the small nation in Central America. President Manuel Zelaya was captured by the military and exiled on June 28. The action has been nearly universally condemned. Here’s what’s gone down…

It’s apparently not as newsworthy as Carrie Prejean or her nude pictures or the dust-up between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and David Letterman, but as you might have heard, no thanks to the old media, Iran is in rebellion after supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi have taken to the streets, indentifying themselves with color green, over irregularities in voting that eventually led to the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who insists the election was “real and free.”