Monday, August 9, 2010

The Wars

A recent news article stated that Wisconsin Congressional candidates websites do not address the wars. It is pretty clear from my site that I oppose the wars and feel we must bring the troops home. The single-most reason is that the wars are not declared.

To be honest, my site only mentioned Iraq by name, but I did say wars in the text portion. That was from 2008 when Iraq was in the limelight more that Afghanistan.

To make my position more clear, I will not vote for any bill or budget that funds an undeclared war. If we have not used our Constitution to declare the conflict, then the Congress is not authorized to fund it.

Wars are not productive. They do not add to our economy. If you imagine all the money spent on the wars spent on domestic industrial production, though we would still be in debt, every family would have a new car, their house payment halved and at least one critical surgery available for them when they needed it. I am not promoting socialism, but the fact that instead of anything tangible we have broken nations in need of expensive repair.

I have little faith that Iraq will not collapse in the future under the pressure of religious and cultural differences. Does anybody truly feel that thousands of years of conflict is now erased due to American influence? The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds remained in a single nation solely due to the iron fist of Saddam Hussein. The withdrawal from Iraq which is now beginning will not remove all troops. We will be stationed there forever as we have been in Germany, Japan, Korea and countless other nations.

Afghanistan has even more severe obstacles to stability, they are truly a third world nation without any real exports other than opium. Without firing a single shot, we could have disabled them forever by giving our citizens more freedom. With the legalization of drugs, aside from saving hundreds of billions domestically on enforcement and incarceration, the price of opium would drop to the point Afghanistan would lucky to feed themselves and could no longer fund terrorism around the world.

Now, be clear that legalization does not mean endorsement of drug use. I only support that the free American people be allowed to make their own personal value judgments. I, also, think a drastic decline of the effects of the black market drug trade would be a beneficial to our domestic situations of gang violence and gun crime. There would even be a benefit to the international issues of Mexican drug gang violence and the funding of terrorism.

I will reiterate that I will not support funding the current wars. I will support bringing all our troops home from around the world. Our troops should only be stationed or actively in combat when in immediate defense of our nation and when we have a Constitutionally declared war.

Wars should be rare and be backed by the people. It is their liberty and property on the line, we must never keep the people out of the loop.

1 comment:

George Meyers said...

Good evaluaton, Joe. We really cannot afford all these wars. And we don't need them either. They gain us nothing but debt.