American Wars To Prevent the Wars of Others??

Seth Mandel is a neoconservative. Therefore, most of what he says has nothing to do with augmenting the common good of Americans and everything to do with diminishing it. He will defend Bibi Netanyahu to the hilt as here, ignoring the abundant negatives that have flowed from the U.S. embrace of Israel.

Mandel wants the global war on terror to go on and on even though the war on terror is producing new terrorists at a greater rate than it is diminishing them. Why?

“The war on terror is far more relevant to America’s day-to-day security maintenance because it involves the prevention of the multitude of threats to the American homeland.”

To the contrary, the war on terror produces more and greater threats to continental America from jihadists, and also dramatic threats to this nation’s freedom stemming from the U.S. government itself. Not to mention the epic costs of producing these minuses. Given the proven inability of the U.S. government to prevent 9/11, even when it could have and should have, there is no case for supporting U.S. government activities, including the war on terror, that augment threats like that one, even if they were then and still are small in number.

Mandel has a strange new justification for the war on terror:

“The global war on terror, then, can be just as much about preventing additional land wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

Wars to prevent wars? This makes no real sense. How has this worked out so far? What wars has the U.S. prevented? Name one. What wars has it caused? Several come to mind. Hasn’t the U.S. so far destabilized the Middle East and Central Asia? Neoconservatives do not have a habit of letting facts enter into their arguments.

Besides, even if the U.S. tries to prevent foreign wars in foreign lands by starting them, what is that but attempting to be preemptive policeman of the world? How has that worked out so far in Iraq? And how does that work for the common good of Americans? Policeman of the world is an impossible role for any one country for any number of reasons that are obvious to anyone who thinks about it except a neoconservative like Seth Mandel or to a growing cohort of half-crazed U.S. senators.

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2:07 pm on November 6, 2014