I am now officially an anti-war activist, as long as the people leading our military are those who have opposed the military all their lives. Misunderstanding the proper place for the use of military force, they are simply posers, putting our troops in harm's way for some manufactured cause that they hope will make them look good.
By no means am I saying I am against the military or the use of force when our national interests are threatened. But we have America’s most famous anti-war activist as our Secretary of State and a President and Vice-President who never found a military action they didn’t oppose, telling us we need to start firing missiles or dropping bombs on Syria.
I have a very low level of confidence in their “high confidence” military-sounding declarations that Syrian President Assad has used chemical weapons in the civil war going on there.
The only real regard we have seen the White House have for the military seems to be making sure that they are fundamentally transformed into a politically-correct, anti-religious (except for Islam) force indoctrinated into Obama’s anti-free enterprise, anti-limited government ideology.
It looks like the same people who wrote in Department of Homeland Security internal documents that the greatest threat to America was recent veterans from the military and Tea Party activists, are writing military training manuals that tell us “the colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule” are an example of “extreme ideologies and movements.”
As Robert Bridge pointed out on rt.com, the military manual, obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information request, defines extremism as a “term used to describe the actions or ideologies of individuals or groups who take a political idea to its limits, regardless of unfortunate repercussions, and show intolerance toward all views other than their own.” It goes on to say that “many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”
But back to Syria. Regardless of the veracity of who fired chemical weapons on whom, the necessity of involving the U.S. military in an operation that is anything but quick and decisive is questionable here. And with those who are the potential target essentially being apprised by the President and the Secretary of State of what the attack will be and the limited duration of it, the effectiveness of this action is even called into question.
Our nation needs to stand down in Syria, and instead deal with the important issues of stopping the looming economic disaster called Obamacare and getting the American people involved in restoring representative government to a nation being led by an imperial President and an out-of-control bureaucracy.
Rolf Yungclas is a recently retired newspaper editor from southwest Kansas who has been speaking out on the issues of the day in newspapers and online for over 15 years
