It is interesting to note how many pro-intervention, pro- “boots on the ground” neoconservatives have never served in the military.

I’m grateful that America treats its veterans better now than it did in decades past. My father was spit on by hippies when he came home from Vietnam. Yet, “thank you for your service” comments don’t undo the horrors of war. Gratitude is no substitute for not sending brave young Americans into harm’s way unless it’s absolutely necessary.

President Reagan used open military force about three times in his presidency. President Clinton deployed the military left and right, in one peacekeeping or nation-building exercise after another. President Bush II campaigned on a less interventionist foreign policy. He said America needn’t be the world’s policeman, and this view was held by most of the conservative movement in the 1990s.

9/11 changed the world, though. Military action was absolutely necessary after those attacks; you can’t let something like that go without response. Yet, if you’d told me on 9/11 that ten years later I’d be in Afghanistan, deployed in what was ostensibly the same war, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet there I was, on 9/11/11, in Afghanistan, as we attempted to turn the country into a pro-western democracy.

“It’s easy to be a hawk when someone else does the fighting.” 

Read the Remainder at Breach Bang Clear