The isolationists are missing
by digby
This should be illuminating. I’m going to guess the answer is “whenever we damned well want to!”
How odd. The alleged “isolationist” wing of the conservative movement seems to be missing.
The closes you will get to anyone even thinking Iraq was a mistake is the moderator KT McFarland, who believes that the mistake was in thinking we were fighting members of the human species instead of the strange, other-worldly creatures they really are:
After one of the longest wars in American history we have little to show for the thousands of American deaths, tens of thousands of American casualties and trillions in spent American treasure.
Why? Because we failed to realize one essential truth of the Middle East — that the nations in that part of the world aren’t just like us.
We in the West think of peace as society’s default position. War is a temporary state of affairs that that happens when peace fails. For us, war is something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When it is over, win or lose, the warring factions lay down their arms, and resume their normal lives.
We realize, too late, that President Bush shouldn’t have taken us into Iraq, and President Obama shouldn’t have taken us out.
In the modern Middle East, war and peace are seen through a different lens. War is the default position, the normal state of affairs. Peace is what happens between wars; it is the temporary pause where defeated factions fade into the woodwork to lie low, regroup, and plan their next assault.
Sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it?
The Heritage Foundation’s Carafano, Senator Cotton and presidential candidate (!) John Bolton are all unreconstructed hawks who believe that George W. Bush won the war and Obama came along and ruined everything.
I’m sure the Paulites will be in attendance as they usually are and the Village press corps will dutifully report that they are taking over the GOP. But this panel is much more indicative of the Republican party than the libertarian party animals that descend on CPAC every year. Mainstream GOP national security ideology runs the gamut of hawks, super hawks and dystopian annihilationists..
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