Mabye this Whole Neo-Con Thing Will Work After All

Syria in trouble.

Many will argue that the all the events the neo-cons essentiall take credit for, "would have happened anyway." Most prominent: the fall of the Soviet Union...I hear many say, "oh, it would have happened without Reagan," or "it happened despite the United States."

These things are nonsense because they are stated precisely because they cannot be retorted. Who knows what would have happened under different circumstances? The point is, the outcome worked out generally well, given all the unknowns. That is cause for giving credit where credit is due.

The overall foreign policy position of containment against the Soviets is hard to argue against. We survived potential nuclear disaster without a direct confrontation with the Soviets and that empire no longer exists. Granted, there are problems that spawned from the Cold War (Al Queda, for one) and we still may see the negative affect of nuclear proliferation if a bomb gets in the hands of a terrorist group...but, let's face it - we were looking at the end of civilization, and even a terrorist group with a nuke or 10, cannot expect to end civilization the way a nuclear war between Russia and the US could have.

Now many point to Vietnam as a bumbling diaster and it many respects it was. But one must also grant that is was part of the overall policy of containment, which in the long run, seems to have worked.

I think we can look at how the United States operates in the world anew. I'm not sure if the policy of preemption is the right name for it...but a more aggressive US foreign policy towards states harboring bad intentions and creating weapons to be used against us ought to be combined with ideas about spreading human liberty to regions of the world that find themselves in a sorid and negative state, probably isn't a bad thing. I think this is Bush's overall idea, one that I hope we try to see through, without too many bumbling Vietnam-like problems.