If Libya attacks us then we should go to war. Not until then.
Exactly Willow.
This is the feeling of the old isolationist conservative party, the one that tried to tell men like FDR and Truman that Government didn't have the money or competence to save the world. [The old conservatives used to protect us from the liberal "world improvers" who wanted to bankrupt the taxpayer on behalf of the impossible, e.g., turning Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya into quaint America-loving satellites] These smart isolationist conservatives realized that nothing concentrates executive power or grows the size of government more than its war powers -- because war, more than anything else, can be
used by corrupt or incompetent bureaucrats to enlarge budgets and erode freedoms (which freedoms bureaucrats hate because they can be used by citizens to curb the growth and power of the state, and thus end the free ride of bureaucrats).
The old conservative party didn't suffer from the illusion that Big Government could end poverty at home or eradicate evil abroad. [While improving or saving the world might be a noble endeavor, this is beyond the scope of Washington's capacities and rightful duties]
Moreover, conservatives realized that attempts to save the world meant that the American people had to build highly concentrated levers of power inside Washington. Making Washington powerful enough to control 50 states was lamentable; making it large enough to control the globe was a disaster of bankrupting proportions. Which is why the old conservatives drew a strong line between defending the nation (a necessary goal), and saving or managing the world (a liberal pipe-dream)
The old conservative party wisely taught us to be weary of concentrated-power-levers because those levers were used by fallible, corruptible bureaucrats. Meaning: if we tried to end evil abroad, we would be stuck inside bankrupting quagmires, as Washington only got bigger and stronger.
The great conservative postwar president, Dwight D. Eisenhower -- a man who straddled the ideological divide between the old isolationism and the emerging
'military-forward' Cold War -- warned America of the dangers of the military industrial complex, which would spawn whole industrial sectors inside defense policy, leading to perverse incentives where Halliburton was paid to rebuild things blown up by Lockheed Martin at "no-bid" rates.
Eisenhower watched as anti-communism trumped isolationism, and conservatives increasingly supported pre-emptive military action to spread democratic utopia in the face of a strategically overblown soviet threat.
(The Left over-emphasizes poverty and inequality to grow Washington's power; the Right, starting with the Cold War, over-emphasized National Security to do the same. Each party created a special interest network of immoveable government agencies and feeder industries who benefited from the policies of their political ATM machines. This is exactly what the old conservative party warned would happen if you gave Washington too much power to do anything, including defense. These special interests would eventually use the concentrated power of government to grow a "no-bid" culture which enriches itself at the expense of the people).
I've tried to talk to some of my Republican friends about the transition from small isolationist government to Big Military Government -- especially under Reagan, who slyly grew Washington more than any politician in the past 50 years -- but I can tell they've never studied the history of their own party. The brilliance of conservative isolationism was suppressed by Talk Radio and FOX News to convince most of America to get behind George Bush in 2003.
That is, we have a generation of voters who have been captured by party Aparachicks like Mark Levine and Rush Limbaugh, who do the bidding of Movement Conservatism, which ultimately answers to the interests which have corrupted defense policy in ways that keep great men like Ron Paul up at night.
Ron Paul thinks we didn't have 3 trillion dollars to attack a country who posed no threat (no matter how evil the dictator in charge)-- and he is more worried than anyone else about what is going to happen when the War on Terrorism comes back in 2012, when the neoconservatives re-take Washington. We are going to descend back into the rabbit hole of color coded hysteria, where shadowy connections are fabricated between retarded underwear bombers and countries which contain lots of oil. The only way we can protect ourselves from the kind of bankruptcy Ron Paul predicts, is if both political parties transcend their current echo chambers and start studying policy and history.
Turn off Limbaugh and FOX and study policy and history. Your ignorance hurt us terribly in 2003 -- we can't afford the second act.
http://www.rense.com/general80/wilmce2.htm
