First principles: A dialogue

So what are your top political concerns? I've been asked by aTypical Joe
for my top 10--in order--as part of a meme begun by Dan at Searchlight Crusade.

So now my big things are on the table. I'm not hiding my agenda. Put yours on the table too, and even if we cannot come to an agreement, it may be obvious why, and we may get along better because of it.

Joe adds:

I'm always running around here telling folks that I'm going to make a Democrat out of them ...I blog to engage in dialogue, to exercise my mind, to deepen my thinking on any particular thing. I appreciate this invite.

I'm a less-is-more kind of girl, so I don't have 10 big things. I really only have one: The War on Terror.

I was for the war on terror before President Bush was, before the first bomb hit the World Trade Center. To my mind, we've been at war since the storming of the US Embassy in Iran in 1979. We just didn't know it yet.

And our half-hearted, half-assed response to that act of war began a pattern that was repeated under Reagan when terrorists killed 241 Marines in Beirut and the United States withdrew its forces. Clinton's response to Osama bin Laden's assorted depradations against the US gave more aid and comfort to the enemy as it bolstered their belief that the US was weak and unwilling to fight. As far as I'm concerned, our response to these attacks led inexorably to the attacks of September 11.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I should add that both Joe and Dan list the war as their number one priority, too. But I'm more sanguine than Joe about the outcome, thanks mostly to the blogging of people like Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail, Michael Yon and Wretchard at the Belmont Club, whose reporting of events is both dispassionate and knowledgeable. Unlike the hysterical and negative reporting of the mainstream media, which focuses on the suicide bomb of the day and little else.

Let me also add that if, after 9/11, George Bush had decided to bomb Afghanistan to Kingdom Come and plow the land with salt, I probably would have supported that, too, as I believed it was necessary to show the terrorists and the world that we were not going to tolerate attacks on US soil under any circumstances. But Bush had another, better, idea: Establish democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq because democratic peoples are far less likely to engage in war for war's sake: Their people won't permit it.

So the war is my number one concern. I have other political concerns, which I'll address in subsequent posts, but next to the war they look like small potatoes: We can argue nonstop about judicial appointments or energy policy or the role of government but those concerns are pretty much beside the point if we as a society don't survive.