GGniner Wrote:America has been involved across the globe, including the ME for 220 years. Commerce, wars, charities, and tourism. Yet it is the radical muslims, out of all the religious, ethnic, and cultural groups that get a pass for their terrorism???....The constitution was not intended to be a suicide pact or an excuse to be pacifist.
Did their status as founders stop Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Monroe from projecting US military power in our national interests?......or does "blowback" go back to the founders? and this was even before the global economy emerged.
You're doing three things that are very indicative of sloppy thinking.
1) It isn't "a pass" to understand things from the other side. It actually helps you fight them better if you understand what enables them to recruit, get popular support, etc. This is black and white, normative thinking on your part where you should be using positive, objective analysis.
2) Just because one believes that there are unintended consequences to our actions, doesn't mean you favor isolationism. What it means is that you acknowledge that unintended consequences exist, and you factor them in to your policy-making process. To deny that they exist so that you don't have to factor them in seems to me to be the truly idealistic and naive position.
3) Because someone doesn't agree with a dumb war that has emboldened our enemies -- al Qaeda and Iran -- or believes that we should take into account the long term consequences of a heavy handed foreign policy when we formulate our strategy, doesn't mean that person's a pacifist. Its a cheap rhetorical trick for you to pull out to stack the deck in your favor.
But the world is a complicated place. One can believe that we should account for a possible backlash against our foreign policy when we make it, and still believe that in
some cases its the right thing to do anyway. Those two concepts are not mutually exclusive at all, except in the the black-and-white mind of a neo-conservative that sees all international relations as a profoundly moral struggle.
At the end of the day, classical realism governs international behavior. The world is not always a moral battlefield in which one side is good and the other is bad -- all are pursuing their interests. And to do a good job of pursuing your interests, you need to take into account potential unintended consequences. The neo-conservative, instead, wishes to dismiss those unintended consequences as signs of evil that simply justify more ill-considered policy choices.
My biggest fear with your thinking, which I see in a lot of your posts, is that its indicative of someone who has not served in the military nor extensively lived abroad, someone who has been seduced by a romantic vision of the world by people who write in sharp or flowery prose about international affairs in moral, apocalyptical, epic terms (the likes of Mark Steyn, whom I presume has shaped your thinking a good bit -- perhaps Christopher Hitchens, maybe the auditory stylings of a Hugh Hewitt). It is very easy then, to look at the world and think certain things are mutually exclusive -- that one either wants to go forth and spread freedom, or else be pacifist apologist for dictators and terrorists...
There's a whole other world out there, which most of the world subscribes to (including the US, when it is not caught in one of its occasional fits of moralistic -- or isolationist -- zeal) in which foreign policy is made in dispassionate, rational, pragmatic terms -- which takes the world as it finds it, rather than as it wishes it to be -- and uses that as a jumping off point to advance the interest of the state, something that in the U.S. can fortunately co-incide with doing a lot of good for the world at the same time.
Also your willingness to treat the constitution as if its something pliable, something that can and should be bent to the will of those in power and redefined -- though not material to this discussion, is illuminating all the same.