GordonUnleashed

A Legacy of Losing: JFK, Obama and Viet Nam

October 15th, 2007 by Steve

Andrew Sullivan raised a question. I’ve got an answer.

Q: Larison doesn’t see any overlap:

Sure, superficially Obama and [Ron] Paul might seem to offer some similar themes, and both did oppose the Iraq war, but Obama is essentially an interventionist at home and abroad and Paul is diametrically opposed to both. One invokes JFK, the other invokes Robert Taft. Obama thinks everything on earth is tied to our national security; Paul thinks that there are very few things overseas that are tied to our national security.

A: JFK gave us the Viet Nam “Conflict,” which served no vital national interest [poor grammar (perhaps a translation issue); accurate article]. Ron Paul would prefer that the Department of Defense actually be about defense and not about offending most of my veteran friends who signed up to “solemnly swear, (or affirm), that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”

I didn’t spend over a decade in the Army to build nations, police the world or install a freer election system (and they call this democracy?) than we have in the United States — which was accomplished by the force of guns aimed at people who didn’t have WMDs nor harbor bin Laden.

I’ll never forget the day “The Wall” fell in Germany. It was the only time I recall not being irritated by a traffic jam; people and luggage stacked up in broken-down Traubis to escape the totalitarian East was the perfect symbol that freedom had won this round.

Now we have the totalitarian West, where we remove our shoes for TSA agents in order to not recall that the concept of habeas corpus has existed since the year 1215.

An interventionist foreign policy doesn’t work well for very long and the consequences are often dire. Coca-Cola, Levis and the Rolling Stones won the Cold War (to be sure, there was a military stick to the free market carrot). Instead, Obama proposes that we retry failed policy by following in the footsteps of the man who more-or-less brought us Viet Nam.

We all know how that one ended up.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Election Reform, Bad Democrats, Ron Paul, National Politics, Libertarian Movement

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