Forum Post: On American Behavior in the International Realm

The war in Iraq should not have happened; I think we can all agree on that. The war in Afghanistan, however, is quite another matter altogether. Declaring war on a nation is a legitimate response when operatives of that nation engage in an attack of that scale on American soil. The problem is that Bush's focus on Iraq meant that Afghanistan was let go until it was untenable, leaving us 0 for 2 instead of 1 for 1 like we could have been. Our job in Afghanistan should have been to go after and nab bin Laden, and then use our forces and our money to bootstrap Afghanistan the way we did Europe in the 1950s.

As far as questions on other wars we've engaged in, let me say this: America is not perfect. Quite frankly, we've been blithering idiots at some times and rather dangerous neighbors at others. We belonged on the side of the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War; what we were looking at there was a people's revolution that chose to borrow the banner of communism because it was convenient. Had we gone the other way we could have turned Vietnam into a Little Tiger thirty years ago. Our policies in Latin America have often been designed to protect the same multinationals that OWS is protesting (to the point of propping up despots in Latin American countries) and we owe Latin America a public apology for that. As far as Libya, Uganda, etc. there needs to be some sort of agreed-upon procedure for enforcing ICC warrants that would allow UN member nations to send in small groups of people as arrest and retrieval officers to pick up international criminals without starting wars.

Wars for oil/energy/resources/etc. are both bad ethics and bad policy; if we don't like our dependence on foreign oil then that's what renewable energy is for and that's why we should focus on renewables like solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal and alternative vehicles like the electric car. I have no more patience for a semipriviatized military and a bloated, unworkable defense industry than you do; I want to see firms like Halliburton and Wackenhut dissolved. I also want to see a return to R&D (including basic scientific research), prototyping, and supply handled through government labs once more, and I'd like to see DoD labs investing in things like space travel that can benefit all of humanity the way they did during the Space Race. Essentially, I want to see the military-industrial complex dismantled and retooled to serve America alongside the rest of the world rather than at its expense.

As far as the prospect of a future with China at the helm, absolutely not. If you'd said the EU, then I could understand where you're coming from; they seem to have a far better regulatory track record than we do, tend to be far less willing to go to war, and overall have built a more planet-friendly and sustainable continent than we have. China, on the other hand, I don't want within a million miles of the helm of the world as they are right now. Given how things are over there right now, China either is poised to do or is already doing pretty much everything you complain about the US and American multinationals doing, and they're going about it a lot more roughly than we do.