America’s Foreign Policy: Time To Stop Babysitting The World

by John Hawkins - January 18th, 2008 - Townhall.com

If you rant about neocons maliciously tricking America into war and an American empire, excuse the terrorists for attacking us on 9/11, falsely accuse the President of lying to get us into war, and suggest impeaching Bush over a war that was initially even supported by the likes of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Chuck Hagel, you can't expect to be embraced by conservatives who agreed with Bush then, agree with him now, and think your arguments are insulting. Put another way, you can argue for a more "humble and skeptical" foreign policy without being a jerk about it -- and we definitely do need people to do just that.

I support the war against the Islamo-fascists. They attacked us for a couple of generations before they hurt us enough to get our attention. However it is insane to pretend that with the growing probability they will get nuclear weapons unless we stop them, we can just end the war.

Iraq is not a separate war. It is a part of the war against the Islamo-fascists, or the war against "terror" as Bush calls it. Different labels but same premise.

Things have not gone perfectly in this war, but we are winning. The costs of some "mistakes" has been loss of support for the war by many in America who should know better. Mistakes is in quotes in the previous sentence because some of the previous "mistakes" are now making our current actions work better. Like the so-called mistake to shut down the corrupt army left over after we invaded. Their new army is working with us because the corrupt elements were purged. The surge is working with their help. That does not mean we keep up our current strategy forever though. It is a strategy for a specific situation. As that situation changes we need to adjust again. That is what this article is pointing out.

As we come to a time for that adjustment to start, this article is pointing out that our overall Foreign Policy needs to see some adjustment too. We need to pull out of many of our commitments made at earlier times when things were different.

World War II is over. The cold war is over. There are many commitments made at these earlier times which any sane country would review and change. Don't forget, thanks to Jimmy Carter we still are sending several billion dollars every year to Egypt. Is there anyone who thinks we are getting anything for this huge bribe on behalf of Israel?

It is time to stop babysitting the world.