Or how about during the war of 1812, when the British sailed over and burned Washington D.C?

Or how about during WWII, when Hawaii got bombed and we had German submarines off our coasts?

That whole “two oceans” thing is 100% bullshit.

I think the role of the military industrial complex and AIPAC (and the rest of the Jewish nationalists) shouldn’t be ignored.

Please… this typical neocon argument has been used before with no success. It proves nothing first of all because you’re comparing apples and oranges, secondly because you bloat some of your facts, and thirdly because even if your pirate examples are legit, wrong actions in the past do not justify or current mistakes.

“Yet our Presidents since the time of Thomas Jefferson have engaged in at least 12-17+ undeclared wars.”

Oh really? Who were the terrorists that hated us then? What were the names of those wars? How many years did those wars last? How deep in debt did we go by funding these wars?

Throwing out numbers is pretty easy, backing it up factually with valid examples is another story.

Wordsmith writes:

“Furthermore, historically, it is quite the norm for us to turn our warriors into social workers, as an occupying force”…

Try this on for size and see if it makes sense. “Furthermore it is quite the norm” for us to allow illegal immigrants to cross our borders. Furthermore it is quite the norm for us to vote for unbalanced budgets. Furthermore it is quite the norm that we spy on citizens, it is quite the norm that we establish a welfare state through so many of our socialist policies.

You’re going to have to do better than that. Providing examples of past mistakes DOES NOT justify the current mistakes.

I also find it troubling that you fail to understand the definition between isolation and non-intervention.

Many people here and abroad would disagree with your opinion that “the U.S. is not a hostile power”. Even if we aren’t, have we not funded and aided hostile powers and conitnue to do so now – including the state of Israel? Yes, we do. I believe that’s called intervention and is precisely the peril of our entangling foreign policy.

interventionism = I go over to my neighbor’s house and tell his kids what to do

non-interventionism = I can still speak to my neighbor, but not tell his kids what to do

ergo,

isolationsim ≠ non-interventionism

This was not done by a written law (as they were,afterall–pirates) but by cutting down the flagpole of the US Consulate.

So a comparison to Iraq is not entirely correct. Because while Tripoli WANTED War with us, and committed an act of War AGAINST us, Iraq did not.

A brilliant entry though. I am a Ron Paul supporter, and i’m glad to see this kind of intelligent dialoguem rather than the typical, “He is anti-war and therefor liberal!” bullshit.

I’m sure some people do do this, but on the other hand it’s also easy to get this impression if you’re arguing with a bunch of people at once. I was never particularly impressed with the arguments (about the war) based on constitutionality, nor do I support Paul because I think he’s the self-styled ‘The Champion of the Constitution’. Even for things like second amendment rights, where the constitution is fairly clear, supporters should have some backup arguments to explain why the constitutional position is *also* a good one – otherwise opponents can rightly say ‘well, surely you’ll support an amendment to change things, then!’ (like that clown George Will wrt the second amendment).
So, anyway, my green-eyeshade argument about swimming pool deaths is not a dodge from some previous position.

Will they pick up their marbles and go home

Interesting question. There are things I dislike about all the candidates (including Paul), and it’s not easy for me to figure out who my second choice will be. The following are quite important to me:

- opposition to illegal immigration
- support for civil liberties; and in this I include support for habeas corpus and opposition to torture, as well as warrantless wiretapping
- fiscal conservatism
- opposition to the war on drugs
- a federalist stance on other issues, such as homeschooling, health supplements, and whatever else (ideally, abortion and drug laws as well)
- opposition to federalization of healthcare
- conservative (in the sense of cautious, prudent, not radical) foreign policy.

So you can see where I run into problems with everyone including Paul (whose foreign policy is too radical, even if I agree with the general direction of less foreign involvement), and the Libertarians themselves (who are squishy-soft on illegal immigration in addition to sharing Paul’s radical foreign policy). To begin with, of course, almost everyone (on the R side) seems to support the War on Drugs, torture, detention without trial, and increased surveillance with decreased oversight. This pisses me off (and strikes me as deeply unamerican) and is a big reason why I support Paul. On the D side, I can find some candidates who are OK on these issues, but they support illegal immigration (drooling over the prospect of a demographic lock for the Democrats I imagine) and government healthcare, and are reliably lousy on federalism generally.
Possibly Thompson will have to be choice #2, assuming he outlasts Paul.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Even The wikipedians report that this is about , the dangers of disunion – “The speech created a lasting image of the danger of disunion because of slavery, and it rallied Republicans across the North.”

As for the Iraq war and the war on terror, let me use an admittedly over simplified analogy. Imagine you are a little nerdy kid in 3rd grade, and you really don’t like the biggest toughest kid in the class, because he is always getting the other kids to play baseball instead of D&D. How do you fight him and win ? In a stand up fight he would kick your ass.

What you do is you goad him. you keep doing little annoying things that make him mad, hoping that he will over react. The more he reacts to you, the more the other kids see him as a threat to them too. If you can make him over react, and hit you, for what is seemingly a minor annoyance, you win, because then all the kids will be against him and will sympathize with you for the injustice done to you.

If you are the Big kid, best to back off, ignore and marginalise the nerdy Kid.

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/house.htm

Show me where Lincoln referred to secession!

It’s your intellectual integrity that’s at stake here. And that has a direct impact on how seriously I, or anyone else, should take your opinions on Iraq.

Because the Congress has to then TAKE RESPONSIBILITY DIRECTLY for the conflict. With the Iraq war authorization, congress can hedge, and then blame the president if it goes wrong. Further the people can vote every two years to get rid of their congressman, making them more sensitive to the will of the people. Generally, Congressmen are less likely to declare war rashly, than they are to authorize the president.

As far as the house divided speech, it was as much about the risk of secession (or lack of risk) as it was about slavery. You need to put it in context. Any relationship with the iraq war argument is a stretch at best, and it certainly has nothing to do with the value of public opposition or support for the war.

We debated Iraq since they invaded Kuwait in 1989.

We’ve debated in Congress. Debated at the UN and debated in nearly every election in the years between 1989 and 2002 and BEYOND.

You’re problem is that you LOST the debate and the adults remained in charge. Deal with it. Grow up!

Wordsmith: Do we have any of those tin foil hats left? EEKman lost his!

This business about Iraq being illegal, or unconstitutional because it was not “declared” is another of those mindless points which only serve to distract from the fundamental issues and discussions of effective strategy to pursue in dealing with the Islamist threat.”

Oh give me a break. Had congress lived up to their responsibility and declared the war properly, they would have been forced to have the debate then instead of now and would have saved us billions of dollars, saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, if not eventually millions and we wouldnt have done untold damage to our reputation around the world.

If congress properly debated the issue before the war in preparation for a proper declaration, they could have realized that the evidence against Saddam was flimsy at best, intentionally deceptive and treasonous at worst and we might have saved ourselves from committing the colossal clusterfuck that is iraq. All it would have taken is some hard questioning on the prewar intelligence for the house of cards to come tumbling down.

It’s enough to make the Grim RP’ers heads explode, but I am glad to see that your efforts did at least attract a handful who didn’t deserve the standard response: ” tinfoil hat wearing moonbat and everyone who hates him are l0zers in their parents basements.” Maybe there’s hope for them yet.

On the other hand, I’m still waiting for Galt to acknowledge his factual and historically inaccurate, misleading comments regarding Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. Until we get that cleared up, I’ll stand by with an extra tin foil hat just in case he needs one.

The only thing I would add to the discussion is a link to the Constitution:

http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/constitution_transcript.html

If you look at Article I, Section 8 you see the powers of Congress enumerated including the power to “declare war.”

No where in the Constitution does it say what form that declaration must take, or that it must be taken at all prior to the use of the U.S. military.

This business about Iraq being illegal, or unconstitutional because it was not “declared” is another of those mindless points which only serve to distract from the fundamental issues and discussions of effective strategy to pursue in dealing with the Islamist threat.

Of course, as soon as the Grim RPers drop the Constitution canard, they simply pick up another one (like terrorism is as threatening as “swimming pools”) and run with it. But at some point, this House of Canards is going to come crashing down.

And again, I want to know what they will do when they realize how empty the promises of Ron Paul really are? Will they pick up their marbles and go home and watch bitterly as President Hillary destroys what’s left of their Libertarian program? Or will they help a GOP candidate with whom they have fundamental disagreements, but who, on the whole, would be less disastrous to their ideals?

“We’ve been intervening, and we’ve been doing it for a very long, long time. Military campaigns waged without a formal authorized declaration by Congress is not a modern transgression of Constitutional requirements”

So, we are to believe since many other uses of the military were undeclared, and that this has happened so often before, it is OK for it to happen in Iraq, and we are to believe that the war in iraq fits nicely in a category with every other non-declared use of force. This is far from the truth.

The non-declared wars prior to WWI were few. The case of the barbary pirates was a limited action, that included issueing of latters of marque and reprisal. More recently, Interventions in Granada, Panama, Haiti, Lebanon and Somalia, to name a few, were limited engagements with only small percentages of our forces involved, and with no long term commitments to the area.

Viet nam, was long term and had substantial military involvement, but even the Vietnam intervention was not a war aimed at regime change or invasion.

The thing that sets Iraq and Afghanistan wars apart from even Vietnam, is that part of the goal of the action was the invasion and destruction of the current regime of a sovereign country. I support the action in Afghanistan, but would have liked to have seen a declaration. Iraq definitely needed a declaration.

Then there is Korea, Kosovo, Bosnia, and the first Gulf war, All UN or NATO wars. Why not declare war in Korea and the first Gulf war ? (The mistakes leading up to the Kuwait invasion notwithstanding) As for the participation in Kosovo and Bosnia, I have serious reservations about these, in particular the concept that NATO or the UN can be the authorizing agent for a military action.