Today's (12/29) Sensible Insight designed to stick in the craw of...

I think you know that the apples and oranges weren't mine to begin with but followed from this statement, "by donning a uniform in the Guard (for whatever reason - duty, honor, money, getting away from the wife once a month) you are doing no more to promote freedom than the "despised" ACLU lawyer challenging the Patriot Act or Cindy Sheehan..."

I knew that by the measure of "promoting freedom" few would say the Guard does less than an ACLU lawyer or Sheehan.

 

The actual phrasing above is "no more" not "less"...

"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism."
William J.Brennan

"Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Indeed it is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which has bred an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."
Douglas Mac Arthur

"The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power"
Douglas Mac Arthur

"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards."
Felix Frankfurter

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts."
Edmund Burke

 

Answer this - were certain wars we've fought in more important to the safety & continued prosperity of America than the Iraq war? WWII was a fight for WORLD freedom where the Allies were united in a just cause. By the contentious nature of support for this Iraq war (here & with traditional allies) and the way it had to be "sold" to the American people (I don't think FDR had to lay out the dangers Japan & Germany presented to the US), and the fact that we're going to cut & run in 2006, so-called "supporters" of this war don't even know what our true objectives are. Do you?

 

Sorry guy but my question wasn't for you.

 

okay. Those were a lot of nice quotes. Let's change "less" to "no more". Now care to answer my question?

 

(DODGE)

 

See post number 50...

 

He wasn't answering your question, he was asking one of you...

 

By following lawful orders, especially bad lawful orders, the Guard is always doing more to promote freedom. The guard can't cherry pick which orders it will follow and which ones it won't. I'm sure the myopic isolationist left finds that hard to fathom but it's true none the less. Cooperation means freedom. The people, the guard, who do what we ask, no matter what we ask, do more for freedom than the people who don't.

Now I'm not saying that dissent is bad. I know you WISH I said that. It would feed your martyr complex. But the truth is that the guard protects the dissenters' right to dissent. Without the Guard, there would be no dissent.

I find it a terribly disrespectful statement to say they don’t do the most to protect freedom. Now do you wonder why people think you and your ilk hate the troops? You can't even give them the minimum level of respect.

 

A streetsweeper does the most to keep the streets clean when he follows instructions to sweep the streets. He does not when he follows instructions to turn over garbage cans on them.

Its not a complicated distinction and it doesn't require praise or criticism of streetsweepers in the making...

 

That's just laughable in real life, though. Following the unlawful orders in Abu Ghraib hurt freedom a lot, for example.

If you really want to make these kind of reductive, blanket statements, then you literally might as well throw in cops, teachers, doctors, and garbagemen.

The question is a lot more specific - whether what we are doing right now in Iraq is useful and productive. This is a policy question, not a debate on the propriety of pissing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

This question begs the question of politics vs. people.

I've been to some ickystans in my time, and I must say that once you get over there, you meet the people as individuals and close-knit families, decent people with a great foundations in religion, who don't drink, live good lives, and just want to help themselves and their families. They also have a sort of ensh'allah attitude of life where they just sort of skate by, hoping something will happen.

Then you have the U.S. military, where you are trained from inception to be there for your troops, your buddy, to never leave them behind. This is your new family.

So the US Troops go over there, and they feel like they are helping the people of Iraq to form a new representative government, they give out candy and soccer balls to the kids, and they are reminded of their own families. If they get out, they reinlist for the money, but also because their platoon is their family, and they want to 'finish the job' because, well, they're good human beings who want to believe in themselves and their job.

That's the personal side.

The political side is that Iraq was never a threat to the United States. The political side is that there were no WMD. The political side is that the United States has no reason to be over there, and this 'helping the Iraqi people have a democracy' was sort of a last-minute excuse when everything else fell apart. The political side is that the U.S. should not participate in 'nation-building,' especially a few at a time, in a land far, far away.

The political side is that everyone knows we're not going to track throughout the world installing democracies, especially in nuclear countries such as NKorea and possibly Iran. We're bogged down in Iraq, and our technological advantages don't seem that great once we're on the ground.

Politically, this is a mess.

I applaud people for being over there, and their committment to their military and the people of Iraq. The idea that the service in Iraq has anything to do with "protection of our freedom" or has done anything but hurt the safety, status, and reputation of our country and military is bullsh!t.