In a recent interview, Dick Cheney attacked the president for “agonizing” over the Afghanistan strategy, saying: “Every time [Obama] delays, defers, debates, changes his position, it begins to raise questions: Is the commander in chief really behind what [the military has] been asked to do?”
I completely agree with Cheney here.
I am not in favor of doing a thorough investigation of strategy or the consequences of military options before sending thousands of soldiers off to war.
I believe all leaders should take the George W. Bush approach and “shoot from the hip.” It doesn’t matter if the opposing country is an actual threat or only a perceived threat. As long as they might be a threat, then we should go ahead and eliminate them.
Pre-emptive war should be the national policy of the United States because diplomacy is outdated. In today’s world, what is needed is more bombs.
Our soldiers surely don’t want a president who worries or is genuinely torn about putting them in harm’s way because delay is weakness.
We need a president who sticks to his position and never thinks twice about whether the path we have chosen is the right one. “Flip-floppers” are not welcome in this country because real leaders don’t need to reflect. They get it right the first time.
We should trust in them with blind, irrational faith. This goes double for military leaders. It obviously doesn’t apply to liberals, though, because we all know that deep down, they aren’t nearly as patriotic as good conservatives.
We need to support our troops... by keeping them deployed indefinitely. It doesn’t matter if there is no clear definition of victory; we need to keep fighting, otherwise the terrorists win.
I absolutely agree with Cheney when he said the previous administration bears no blame for the disintegration of Afghanistan. The Afghan strategy of the Cheney-Bush administration was not flawed in any way.
We don’t need to worry about how Afghanistan has become the heroin capital of the world. Or that the number of U.S. troops has increased by almost 300 percent in the past two years. Neither of these are an indication of failed Cheney-Bush policies.
What is needed in the Obama administration is an increased belief in American exceptionalism: the belief that the United States is the greatest, freest nation the world has ever known.
Because we are the best in history, we have the right — nay, the responsibility — to impose our values and enforce our will on the rest of the world. After all, international relations are obviously based upon the strong dominating the weak.
We have the most powerful military the world has ever known; why shouldn’t the rest of the world do what we say? And the fact that our most successful military engagements came as part of powerful coalitions is trivial and inconsequential.
World opinion doesn’t matter because we are the United States of America, and as such, we should be able to do whatever we want, and everyone else should toe the line we dictate.
The basic foundation of Cheney’s point is that the United States is always an agent for good, and thus we are always right. People oppose us not because their best interests diverge from ours, but because they are evil.
It doesn’t matter that our drone strikes kill innocent people more often then they kill actual terrorists. They are merely guilty by association.
Or evil by association.
Nick Miner is a UF political science graduate student.
