David Gillies:
"I am seriously pissed off with Bush," says my buddy Jim the other night, apropos of nothing. "Yeah," say I, "who the hell is this Miers woman?" "Screw that," replies Jim. "What I want to know is why we haven't invaded Syria yet."
Jim, you see, is one of those bellicose libertarians that voted for GWB in droves. We carried on slating Bush for some time, listing the manifest idiocies and betrayals this administration has foisted on us. It was quite a litany. The Highway Bill. Medicaid. NCLB. SCOTUS. Not exploding Bashir Assad's skull. Letting the decadent Saudi toads finance world terror. Jim said he was probably going to sit the midterms out.
I voted for Bush in 2004 because since 9/11, I've been a single-issue voter: national security. I chose Bush because I planned on voting for the most hawkish person running.
Our dear President, of course, has vastly increased federal spending since the day he took office. He's as 'small government' as Bill Clinton and argueably less.
Yada yada yada....
Whatever. My libertopian domestic policy fantasies pale in comparison to the threat of Islamic terrorism, which is why I consider Iranian nuclear development to be the single most important issue facing America today, and have thought so for two years. Yet disturbingly, Bush has not bombed Iran. Why, I cannot even begin to fathom.
So although I loathe political commitments, I'll make this one:
If Iran successfully tests an atomic weapon before Election Day 2008, I will not vote for the Republican Presidential candidate, even if he is the most hawkish available.
I backed the GOP temporarily because it seemed to take national security seriously (while the Libertarian Party took a long and probably permanent trip to isolationist Fantasy Island). If Iran gets nukes, then we are just counting the days before a major American city gets vaporized, and the Republican Party/Bush Administration has massively failed to protect the country.
UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt defends the weird notion that conservatives have a moral obligation to support the President regardless of what boneheaded mistakes he makes. I was under the impression that conservatives owe greater loyalty to the United States than to the Republican Party. It would appear that Hewitt thinks otherwise.
Hat tip: Jeff Kouba via Powerline.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
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7 comments:
Not that I eagerly await the day when the President makes such a decision, but I found his argument for invading Iraq to be flawed in that of the members of the "axis of evil", he selected only one.
Admittedly, I was willing to give the President the BOD regarding the WMD especially since I had no information to the contrary, although I was not pleased with the decision. We were (and perhaps still are) seriously lacking marks of progress and no evident "exit strategy".
Given all this, however, how could the President NOT invade Iran, Syria, and North Korea since they are all seemingly in the same pot. Why only Iraq?
I'm as far from a military expert as one could get, but I suspect that we lack the resources to take on all simultaneously.
So because of past mistakes, we should just let Iran get nukes?
Since we change presidents every 4 or 8 years, I'm not prepared to hold one president responsible for the mistakes of a past administration. One president decided Saddam needed our help, but was the US trying to help Saddam or hurt Iran?
Regardless, Iran or North Korea do not need nuclear power.
Precisely! We may have made mistakes in the past, but that hardly justifies sitting idle when we can prevent American cities from getting nuked.
You you're okay with Iran having nuclear weapons?
I know very little about US politics and am not a US citizen nor do I live in your beautiful country
but
I think it would have been / be suicidal for any nation -even a super power like the USA to take on Iraq, Iran and Syria all at once.
It seems pretty futile to be in the Iraq even now for the US, UK and all the others that are trying to restore peace there. Hussein was a dictator and an evil man, no mistake, but the situation there for ordinary people is still terrible. Sometimes we lose sight of that - no weapons of mass destruction were found which was the pretext of attacking Iraq (as I saw it anyway)
The question we as Christians should be asking - is - what does God want from us. It has to be love these neighbours and show them a better way. And in that we are failing, I think. Also to those poor families whose loved ones are sacrificed in the war effort.
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