A Peaceful Nation? Pat Buchanan Makes a Point

Pat Buchanan makes a point that few others do, at least in this country.

In the 27 years since the Iranian Revolution, the United States has launched air strikes on Libya, invaded Grenada, put Marines in Lebanon and run air strikes in the Bekaa Valley and Chouf Mountains in retaliation for the Beirut bombing.

We invaded Panama, launched Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait and put troops into Somalia. Under Clinton, we occupied Haiti, fired cruise missiles into Sudan, intervened in Bosnia, conducted bombing strikes on Iraq and launched a 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, a nation that never attacked us. Then, we put troops into Kosovo.

After the Soviet Union stood down in Eastern Europe, we moved NATO into Poland and the Baltic states and established U.S. bases in former provinces of Russia's in Central Asia.

Under Bush II, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, though it appears Saddam neither had weapons of mass destruction nor played a role in 9-11.

Yet, in this same quarter century when the U.S. military has been so busy it is said to be overstretched and exhausted, Iran has invaded not one neighbor and fought but one war: an 8-year war with Iraq where she was the victim of aggression. And in that war of aggression against Iran, we supported the aggressor.

Read it here.

Yep, it goes with being a "hyperpower" and the only nation both willing and able to stand up for Western liberal values.

There was this little thing called the Cold War in which the US stood guard against expansionist international communism, and regimes that murdered approximately one hundred millions of their own citizens, and the result of our sacrifice is a free and prosperous Europe, and Japan, and South Korea, etc. And then there was that genocidal regime in the Balkans that was killing mass quantities of Muslims until the US intervened at NATO's request. And then there was that brutal dictator who not only decimated his own nation's population, but attacked his neighbors. You might remember him. He was the guy who invaded Iran and killed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, only now he's no threat to anyone because the U.S. went in and cleaned house. And then there was that ill-fated attempt to feed starving people in Somalia. And then there was....

Oh..., what's the use? For the isolationists, both left and right, there is no justifiable intervention anywhere, anytime, for any reason. I would have hoped that 9/11 would have rendered their arguments moot, but apparently not. So here we go, once again.

There are plenty of bad guys out there, but the U.S. is not one of them, and nobody else has been willing or able to stand up to them.

Pat's right in one respect. We are not, as some would like to believe, a "peaceful people." We are fighters, and the world is a better place for it. America wages war, frequently and effectively, and to quote a famous criminal mastermind, "that's a good thing."