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Anti-War Not The Same
As Anti-Defense
By Charley Reese
12-23-2


People should make a distinction between someone being anti-war and being anti-defense. The best way, as George Washington said, to preserve the peace is to be prepared for war. The worst thing politicians can do is to squander the nation's resources in unnecessary wars.
 
Look at Vietnam. We know in retrospect that it doesn't make one iota's difference to us that Vietnam is communist. American politicians and businessmen have flocked to do business with the communists. Yet politicians wasted 57,000 American lives presumably to prevent Vietnam from going communist. Another 40,000 were wasted in Korea, as if the politics of the Korea peninsula mattered to us one way or another. I hasten to add, of course, that in both instances it matters a great deal to the Vietnamese and the Korean people.
 
But that's the point. They are Vietnamese and Koreans, not Americans. Who governs their countries is up to them, not to us. God did not put us on this earth to run around the globe deciding which government is appropriate for which country. We are responsible for only one government and one country - ours. We are not doing a very good job at taking care of it, either. Our borders are being overrun, our natural resources are being exploited, and our government is inefficient and corrupt.
 
There is no need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was designed to defend Europe against an invasion by the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union. There is no reason whatsoever for 91,000 American soldiers to be permanently stationed in Germany. There are no military threats to Germany, or to any other European country. There are more people in the European Union than there are in the United States. I imagine that they would field whatever military forces they felt were necessary if we quit being such a sucker as to "protect" people who don't need any protection.
 
There is no reason to keep 36,000 Americans in South Korea or thousands more on the Japanese island of Okinawa. We have no legitimate interest in the Far East except for trade, and military forces are not required for trade. The only country in the Far East that is supposedly an enemy is China, and we're trading with China like mad. Japan is the second-largest economy in the world and can certainly defend itself. It has a warlike tradition 3,000 years old, whereas ours is barely 400 years old. Japan already spends more on its "self-defense" forces than Great Britain and France combined.
 
It might be of interest to know that at the end of World War I, Great Britain's military planners figured the next war Great Britain would have to fight would be against the United States. They saw Germany as having been taken out of the picture, and they saw us as the only threat to Great Britain's dominance. That historical tidbit is a reminder of the wisdom of another thing George Washington said: There is no such thing as friendship between nations. No nation can be trusted beyond its perceived self-interest.
 
The fact that American politicians today routinely refer to this country or that one as "friend" is just more evidence of our intellectual decline. We are powerful today because in the past we've been lucky as hell, and because in the past we had leaders with brains and backbones. We are spending the seed corn of the past, and the American people need to wake up and find something more substantial to rely on than dumb leaders and dumb luck.
 
If I sound grumpy, it's because I am. If I wanted my grandchildren to live in a Third World country, I would move them to one. I have no desire whatsoever to stand silent while cheap politicians reduce this, the greatest country in the world, to just another Third World has-been.
 
 
© 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
 
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021223/index.php
 
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