It WAS Our Policies

And so what for it?

This is going back to my previous post on Ron Paul & Rudy Giuliani's little fun at the debate. Nick at Boots & Sabers and his own blog questions the typical reaction defenders of the War on Terror have when others say we were attacked for our policies.

Often times the response is "No, it was because they hate us for our freedom and liberty". Well, that plays a role in all of this but what the response does is to fail to respond the real charge being made and that is our policies are wrongheaded.

Officer Fabiano from the Kenosha area was just gunned down on a routine traffic stop. Why was he gunned down? Because of the Kenosha County Sheriff Department's policy to stop and cite traffic law violators.

Now, if the Kenosha County Sheriff Department did not have its policy of stopping and citing traffic law violators Mr. Fabiano would most likely be out on the fairway right now, but most of us (on both sides of the political spectrum) are not going to condemn the policy here. We recognize the need for the policy and the costs of the policy. The costs we see are not limited to dollars.

When the likes of Ward Churchill and Ron Paul come out and say it was our policies we do ourselves little good in saying it was not our policies. We do ourselves much better if we say yes that is true and here is why we have to be resolute in the execution of various policies.

BTW, this is not to say our liberty and freedom are not among the reasons for being attacked, they are. That detestation of our freedom and liberty is also in the writings & speeches of Qutb, Bin Laden, Zawahiri, et al.

Ru Paul

Ru(n) Paul is what I have dubbed Ron Paul. According to JPod I should get a huge traffic shot here sounds like Ru Paul fans spend there time monitoring their inboxes for Google Alerts.

Anyway Ru Paul's argument the 9/11-19 attacked us on account of our policies is correct. However, most people either concede Ru Paul's (or that of his evil twin Patrick Buchanan) premise or do not realize what it is.

What is the premise? The policy the 9/11-19, Zawahiri, Bin Laden, et al. attacked us for our misguided (at best) or our evil (at worst) policies. The solution is to withdraw behind the maginot line of our borders. This typically means sealing our borders to trade, and immimgration as well (however, this is where the likes of Paul & Buchanan split off from the kooky left).

For instance, Pat Buchanan argues we had Pearl Harbor coming in this shortly after 9/11 article.

Now, I do not dismiss Pat's entire case but most of it relies on a knowledge of how events played out in the end. In addition, being able to conduct a more consistent relies on something we do not have in our system of government and that is a long term executives, remember even before term limits having a person as president for more than two terms was non-existant except for FDR.

Pat and Ru long for a period of mythic American isolation from the rest of the world and this period never existed.

Even our founding fathers found it necessary to intervene in world affairs, the Marines sing about this (the Shores of Tripoli).

Sooner or later the Islamists were going to be gunning for us.

Jonah Goldberg takes on Ru Paul's silliness on many more fronts than I do. Check it out.