February 04, 2011
With Egypt’s melodramatic implosion, many Americans are asking, “What has this got to do with us?”
The short answer: everything. We propped up Mubarak because he’s good for Israel, yet most Egyptians want Israel gone. So why not take all our troops out of everywhere? Why not cease all aid to all countries? Why not let the world figure out its own problems and simply buy stuff from people who are willing to sell it to us? Unlike liberals, I don”t purport to know everything there is to know about everything, so I defer to the smart community. The problem is, they don”t agree.
Pat Buchanan makes a fantastic argument for getting the hell out of everywhere and even calls WWII The Unnecessary War. He gets a lot of flak for criticizing how much money we send to Israel, but nobody seems to know how much that is. Wolf Blitzer says it’s $3 billion a year, but others argue that our total cost so far for supporting Israel is over $3 trillion. Loving Israel makes the entire Middle East hate us, but nearly two-thirds of Americans still think it’s a good idea.
Gray Lady Down author William McGowan is one of them. “To stop supporting Israel is to expose it to constant siege and perhaps even annihilation,” he said in an interview. McGowan is neoconservative on most issues and says he thinks the Tea Party’s isolationism is unworkable. He also says libertarians are naïve if they think we can ignore the world’s problems. “Even if you don”t care about human-rights violations abroad,” he says, “our military needs to be ready to respond to strategic threats, and that means fighting terrorism overseas.”
Mark Steyn agrees. His book America Alone proves that the West is the best and Islam isn”t merely different than us, it’s worse. Steyn sees fighting terrorism overseas as a necessary evil and argues that ignoring Islam’s rise is a potentially fatal mistake.
Senator Rand Paul claims this kind of foreign policy is meddlesome and only inspires the jihadists. Paul, who famously said 9/11 was “blowback for our foreign policy,” has been making noise about pulling out of everywhere these days. He wants the USA to perform coitus interruptus on the entire world. He and his dad want to cut $500 billion in government spending, including all foreign aid (yes, to Israel, too). They have a point. Aid rivals AIDS as Africa’s biggest killer because the bulk of the money goes to despots and warlords. It’s clear the best thing we can do for that continent is leave it alone, so isn”t what’s good for the African goose also good for the Israeli gander?
