Re: a dumb query? pls humor me

Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 03:31:40PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote:
Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:

Ummm, many of the overseas military bases are in place at the
*invitation* of the host governments.

OK, then the host country should be providing revenue equal to expenses
incurred on behalf of American taxpayers at the base. They want us to
fight their fights for them, they can pay us.

We also go there so that we can fight the bad guys before they get to us
on American soil.

That crosses the line from defense to offense. My tax dollars go to
defense, not to go start fights. I'd like to get what I paid for,
especially when the defense slice of the expenditures pie is over a third
of it.

I challenge you to provide a statistic. Now, don't get me wrong, I
think it would be great if the US governmnet would get out of the
charity business and leave it to private citizens' generosity.
However, I am also a realist.

I'd rather they just get out of the foreign charity business. American
government should serve American citizens first and only.

How wonderfully parochial. Foreign charity and aid are ways of
generating goodwill. Everybody needs that and it is a way of serving
American citizens, especially if you are one of the millions of
Americans who travels abroad and wants to have a good experience.

I would be a little bit less torqued about foreign aid and a lot more
sympathetic to the cause if the aid we were exporting wasn't a better deal
than what we keep. Did you know Iraq has national healthcare, and it's
currently paid for by US tax dollars?

I guess it is a matter of perspective. There is really only so much
that can be done before people (both in the US and abroad) start
complaining that what should be a humanitarian mission is becoming too
belligerent. Just look at the fiasco in Mogadishu. Good intentions
gone wrong.

I'm rather annoyed at the Clinton Administration for not learning from
the mistakes of the neoconservative administrations immediately prior to
his
term. What the hell do you think is going to happen when you provide aid
of any sort to a country run by a warlord?

The people of Somalia were starving *becuase* of the warlords.

Actually, I think it probably had a lot more to do with too much population
growth in the middle of a region with next to no farmable land or economic
resources. You can't really foreign aid your way around a despot and
extreme famine, unfortunately, especially if the despot happens to have
popular support with the locals as appeared to be the case in Mogadishu.

Providing support to them was the right thing to do. Using the military
to guarantee that the aid reached the people and did not end up in the
hands of the warlords was also the right thing to do.

The problem is, though, that didn't really happen, the supplies still ended
up largely in the hands of warlords because the agencies helping
distributing the aid were either corrupt or couldn't defend themselves
properly. If Somalia was a success, I'd be saying the same thing as you
right now.



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