Your plan is flawed in a few key areas.

First if we did bring home all of our armed forces from overseas to pursue other careers what would the people who work on bases and in conjunction with bases do?

Many of the people who work for the military and retire switch over to government jobs.

This switching is because we have military located all over the world. We wouldn’t need a military under your suggestion and thus Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and all the other defense contractors would either bankrupt or just close their doors. There is no need for missile systems on commercial airliners.

Where would those who work for such companies seek employment? The job market would be flooded with highly skilled employees who work primarily on defense equipment.

This job market would have little to offer those who work on missile systems, military aircraft, or in conjunction with DOD contractors.

It has become a necessary evil in that one supports the other and without one you end up with a great many people out of work. In today’s market with the automakers laying off people, other companies out sourcing workers to foreign nations for cheap labor and the decline of American advancement would leave many on welfare.

So you double the burden of society by bring home all of military members by doing away with jobs that dependants have on base as well as the members not being able to be hired by companies that once supported DOD contracts.

It would be like saying; we need to stop smokers in the US never mind the billions of tax dollars the people spend or the employees the company hires. The government wont simply accept that billions of tax dollars are no longer available they will turn to the public and increase taxes somewhere else to compensate for the loss.

We minded our own business for eight years we turned a blind eye to the ever increasing terrorist threat which culminated on Sept 11.

When we turn a blind eye those who wish to do us harm will continue so at an alarming rate. We need to be physically and internationally involved in all aspects of intelligence gathering and be involved in world affairs to the full aspect we can.

When you neglect to be involved you have no idea what’s coming or what could transpire by such neglect.

Since the advent of international travel the “keep to your own” style of government simply went the way of the dinosaurs.

We must be internationally involved in everything if we are to keep our country safe. Any other choice and we become complacent and suffer such attacks as those who desire to attack us will do so.

Dave in Georgia

(Government employee)

A part of me would like to go back into isolation, though I doubt we could stay there for long. But I do long for a US that could care less about world affairs and just look after our own. One might say that that is rather cold, but let’s face it, a good part of the world doesn’t like us anyway. Yet whenever and whereever there is a disaster the first nation to respond is the United States. I just think it is in our nature to do so, it is who and what we are, our psyche, our makeup.

Can you imagine a world without the US involved? I wrote an essay on this very topic once for my website and I will submit the link for those that might care to read it.

http://tbbc01.tripod.com/id22.html

I am not sure if this will work but if you wish you could certainly cut and paste.

My question is, what are the long-range consequences of your policy? Do you feel that if we got out of world affairs that the world would just leave us alone? Do we become liked in the world? Do we become isolated sitting ducks?

Your plan, I take it, would also bring our intelligence services (as poor as they’ve been recently) out of the field. In such a case, we would only know what happens in the world after it happens. If our enemies decided to make a concerted effort against us (most likely a nuclear attack first), we would have no inkling until they actually attacked. Would this be in our best interests?

I like the theory of “minding our own business”, but sadly I don’t think it’s practical in the real world.

There may be something in the constitution that would allow us to form alliances and defend them, but I’m really not sure. Is there something specific in there about sending our military to aid other countries? I doubt it.

You are absolutely correct that the US has a long history of interventions. My question is were those interventions supported by the CONSERVATIVES of the day. Emphatically no. Conservatives opposed the Spanish American War, our entry into WWI, our entry into WWII (until we were attacked), and the hard core that weren’t swayed by the anti-Communist intervenionism that morphed conservatism during the Cold War, opposed our entry into Korea and Vietnam. I might add that conservatives also opposed Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederacy. The “conservatism” of today is a 50 + year old Cold War “conservatism” that can’t give up its Cold War interventionist mindset and return to the clear non-interventionist, small government roots of conservatism.

If people want to be interventionist then fine. Although they ought to do the fighting themselves. But don’t connect interventionism with conservatism. That is butchering the language.

Ron S., the protection of Israel is the responsibility only of Israel. Just as the protection of Canada is the responsibility of Canada, France of France, Kuwait of Kuwait, etc. etc. etc. I personally would repeal the law against Americans serving as mercinaries. If some Americans want to go fight for Israel then be my guest. But why should our military fight for another country? Where is that in the Constitution?

Red

The only things that bother me about it are that if we did stop all foreign intervention and basically became hermits to the world…well, we could kiss Israel goodbye. Say hello to 1967 all over again, but this time the arabs probably won’t be as inept as they were then. Removing ourselves from the picture would remove all restraints from arab countries regarding Israel. They would know that once the U.S. is out of the way, there would be no reason not to remove those pesky Jews from the planet. Who else would stick up for Israel? Europe? Not likely, since anti-semitism is on the rise there anyway. The U.N.? ha-ha. They might give the arab countries involved a mild reprimand when it was all over, but that’s about it.

The other thing is, what happens with the rest of the world? Will Islamo-fascism stop just because we are out of the picture, or will they just grow stronger? If they get stronger, will they just leave us alone because we are no longer active in the world’s affairs? Will we stop being the “Great Satan” to them? Or will we just roll over for them? Would we just be waiting for them to get strong enough to actually invade us while we sat around and let them? Can we afford to do that? When they do finally attack us, who will help us defeat them? Why would anyone help us when we have withdrawn our support from everyone?

Personally, I would like to pull in all our oars and let the rest of them kill themselves, but I don’t think that that is likely to happen.

Just a few thoughts.