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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Dear America, get your head out of your ass about Bernie Sanders

    he is against war

    He seems generally anti-intervention
-Problem is, the bad guys don't care if you want to fight or not, they're still going to slap you in the face. Ideally, our leader wouldn't go around slapping people but when slapped, he/she will drop the hammer. IMO.




galen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sure. But when was the last time a foreign power substantially threatened the US? Sure, there's lots of groups a/o countries threatening US interests, but there hasn't been a legitimate threat to our national security arguably since the Cold War.

b_b  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The US and US interests can, at times, be indistinguishable. Isolationism--what you're advocating whether you know it or not--has been proven by history to be very bad for a great many people. Isolationism led to literally hundreds of millions of people needlessly suffering and dying in the 20th c. Fortunately, we had these lessons in hand in the days immediately after WWII, and we were able to somewhat contain Stalin's march across Europe. If you like and respect Western Europe at all, you can thank US interventionism, because without it Italy, France, probably even GB would all have become satellite states of the Soviet bloc in the late 40s and early 50s.

This isn't to say that interventionism is always a good policy. But it helps to keep in mind that in some situations protecting our interests around the globe is good for the citizens whom we're immediately protecting, and is good for us in the long run.

China and Russia currently offer the greatest examples of threats to US interests that could ultimately threaten us or our close allies. Both countries are blatantly violating the modern law we all share that says that countries can't annex territory by force. It is the most essential law of the UN. (Annexation was the catalyst that caused both world wars--Franz Ferdinand was a pretext if anything). At some point, these issues will have to be confronted (hopefully Putin will just implode, but surely China won't). We can hope that diplomacy will prevail, but rule of law is more important than diplomacy, IMO.

galen  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You're right. I tend towards hardline isolationism sort of as a holdover from my libertarian days, but I see now that that's less based in reason than emotion and the opinions of a few influential history teachers.

Thanks.

b_b  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, in fairness to you there's a countable part of the population where you live who think that US interventionism involves the Marine Corps occupying the Walmart in Waco.

thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Define Foreign Power. If you mean a sovereign state, then yes. If you mean someone with power that is a foreigner to the US, then no. There are real threats that exist. People want to harm the US domestically and abroad. I'd rather they didn't. My guess is that Sanders rathers they didn't too. I'm just wondering to what extent he would use the US military to ensure this? It's a valid question that should be asked of all candidates. He's going to have to answer these things.

I like his agenda, which keifermiller outlines well in his comment here, but a huge part of the presidency is foreign policy. Money out of politics - who is going to disagree? Income and wealth inequality? -Who, with a conscience is going to argue against this? Climate change? -Okay, I'm with ya. What about the rest? If he wants to ACTUALLY be president, we need more from him. If he just wants to ensure certain topics get in to the debates etc, then he need not elaborate.

It's early in the #sillyseason, I'm sure these things will come up.

galen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Still not convinced it's that much of an issue. I get that there are people that want to harm the US. But by and large, they can't or won't. For all its appearances, terror has killed relatively few people. As you concede, no foreign nation is threatening us. So who is?

In any case, you're right, these issues will certainly come up, since we know that Bernie is a serious candidate, in it to win, etc.

thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Still not convinced it's that much of an issue.
Yeah, its one of those things that isn't an issue until its an issue.

You don't want this or this.

A President is going to have to make BIG decisions that have life and death implications. Knowing where they stand in regard to utilizing our military is pretty important stuff imo.

briandmyers  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've got to agree with cgod on this point :

    We could sustain several 911's a year and they would do less damage to our freedoms and budget than the response to 911 has caused.
thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

For sure. The aftermath of 911 was/is a mess. I never said otherwise, in fact I mentioned it was a reason to know how a leader feels about military might.

That said, we may be able to sustain those types of attacks financially but there are other implications. Remember the national psyche after 911? It was awful. Absolutely awful.

I'd rather never experience that again. Certainly not several times a year.

briandmyers  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Actually, I don't remember it. I'd moved away from the USA about 3 years before, and from the outside, it looked like a lot of media-driven knee-jerk over-reacting (after the first few weeks anyway). Maybe I'm not being 911-sensitive enough, but damn man - you guys allowed what should have been a simple one-time tragedy to become an ongoing tragicomedy of errors which helped to further ruin a country already on the skids.

thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The first weeks sucked. Then we went to Afghanistan and had the world behind us. Then "W" decided to go after the bad guy that tried to kill his daddy.

Imagine a plane takes out the Q1 tower and then the Eureka tower and nothing like it has ever happened before. It would have an effect on you.

briandmyers  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I do know a little about those emotions, though. I lived in Oklahoma City in 1995.

BTW I'm gonna pretend you said "Sky Tower" and, um, hmm - some other big building in NZ. I had to google those two towers to see what you were talking about :-)

thenewgreen  ·  3220 days ago  ·  link  ·  

HA! I swear I googled largest building in New Zealand.

edit: Imagine a plane crashes in to the shire

briandmyers  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Google, being helpful - "NZ? Really? Are you sure you didn't mean 'tallest building in Australia' ? I'm pretty sure that's what you meant, so here's your search results!"

blackfox026  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What specifically do you want a leader to do to ensure a 9/11 doesn't happen again?

thenewgreen  ·  3219 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't have a specific answer, but I would hope that our president take the appropriate steps to monitor terrorist networks and their intentions. I am not an expert in these things, but I would hope our president would be.

Income equality, climate change and campaign finance are all big and important topics that need addressing but our president will still have to protect our nation.

There are those that say Bill Clinton specifically warned Bush about Bin Ladin and Bush didn't take the threat seriously enough.

I would hope our president not be naive or myopic in their agenda. I know that as a liberal it's not cool to say that national security is important, but it is.

Meriadoc  ·  3216 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, to ignore the point of your argument here (sorry about that), a sizeable portion of people say Bush was warned about Bin Laden and didn't follow closely enough because it was politically uncomfortable for him with the personal ties his family had to Bin Laden's network. Keeping military and surveillance tabs on his friends was ironically something he avoided before explosively expanding NSA programs to do just that post-9/11.