Ending wars

Two things will be necessary to stop this country from continuing to wage wars like Iraq:

1. The culture of the country must change – i.e., enough people must be become convinced war is a bad idea except in the most extreme circumstances, (e.g., the Iranians have landed at Annapolis and are marching on DC) – that no politician left or right will even consider advocating or implementing a pro-interventionist-imperialist policy.

2. The left must realize that a large, highly interventionist government at home is necessarily a government that will want to suppress civil liberties here and try to establish an empire to run abroad – when in human history has that not been the case?

The two go hand in hand – it happened with ancient China, Egypt, Rome, and more recently Britain, France, Spain, Russia, Germany, etc. If the government isn’t too big, and doesn’t have too many resources, it’s not going to be undertaking multi-billion-dollar foreign military adventures. Seems simple enough, but not enough folks get it.

Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass and other 19th century Americans whose mantle today’s left-interventionists claim were in fact classical liberals/libertarians. Thoreau once wrote that “The government which governs best, governs not at all,” upping the ante on Jefferson.

American 19th century classical liberals opposed the expansionism that led to the Mexican War (which was backed by the slave-owning South) were vehemently abolitionist, but were just as vehemently against large government. Thoreau famously went to jail for refusing to pay a tax that would have supported the Mexican War and scolded Emerson from his jail cell for not being imprisoned with him.

They understood the link between leviathan-size government, suppression of civil liberties and imperialist wars, a link we seem to have completely forgotten about.