Email Doodlings - Assertion: "a threshold that I believe none of our recent wars has crossed". Me: Really? - Granite Grok

Email Doodlings – Assertion: “a threshold that I believe none of our recent wars has crossed”. Me: Really?

The Assertion that was made was in response what I posted here:

You asked the question as to whether we need to wait until American lives are lost to respond….To me, this means that there must be imminent danger—and that is a threshold that I believe none of our recent wars has crossed—and all other options should have been exhausted. Instead, our recent wars have been pre-emptive with no clear moral certainty that an attack was imminent.

Answer: Really??  Crossed a threshold?

  • Oil is in our self-interest, like it or not.  Gulf 1: Should Bush 1 NOT have rallied the world to throw Saddam out of Kuwait, especially when it looked like Saddam might be able to roll up the Saudis et al?  Just or not?
  • Gulf 2 – lots of UN resolutions were broken by Saddam.  More importantly, if you read the Congressional resolution (of more importance than the UN resolutions to be sure), there was a whole litany of things that they found against Saddam and gave Bush 2 approval for.  And yes, LOTS of countries still thought Saddam had WMDs and that they would be used against the West as he had done so against Iran and his own people.  And Saddam had almost a year and a half of warning to comply.  Just or not?
  • We gave the Taliban plenty of advance warning – give up those that you are sheltering that trained and attacked us.  Were there just reasons to go and eradicate the Taliban from Afghanistan?

My problem is that I believe that Ron Paul IS an isolationist on defense and not just a non-interventionist; and many believe likewise.  I also believe that…

…the technology of war has changed so much, that the nature of who wages war has changed so much, that the treaty and the philosophy of Westfalia (bringing up Just War) has made the word “imminent” almost constant.  The Just War theory covers state based warfare – not a religious philosophy based one that we now have with a stateless enemy.  Troops no longer have to mass in concentrations, industries no longer have to ramp out to turn out war material – the signs of an attack can go unnoticed until after the killing is done.  We almost always have to be in a state of readiness; the times between WW I and WW II, and then the Korean War, and so on to Viet Nam when the military could ramp almost down to nothingness and then ramp up full readiness is gone – the technology is too complex to do that anymore and the training to use such technology takes long time periods to master.  The day of a massive force called up ONLY after an attack is, well, a naive philosophy in my opinion (at least, if you want to win).  It takes time to build the stuff and almost longer to train with the stuff.  While the linchpin of our military is still the boots on the ground, those boots are VERY high tech and instruction and practice are needed.  Time, if we went back to centuries old ways of running our military, that I am certain we would not have.

Again for reinforcement, look what 20 Islamofacists did by using our own civilian technology (jet airliners) against us.  Your outline of Just War fails there.  No build up, no warning, no nothing – but more people died that day than when the might of the Japanese Navy hurled itself against Pearl Harbor 70 odd years ago.  So much more harm can be done with so much less manpower using so little technology with little lead time to respond.

So answer me this direct question – Is it true that President Ron’s stance is “only reaction after people have died permissible and that being pro-active before people die is not”?  That he would NOT be pre-emptive to save those souls?  That he would neuter the intelligence forces such that we couldn’t detect such an attack again?  That his military ramp down would be so much that it would take years to ramp capability up again?

“When seconds count, the police are only minutes away” in defending the Second Amendment also  applies when you scale up to nation size too.

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