Why the fuck would we want to avoid war with these assholes? And even if we tried to avoid war, I think these guys might have a say in the matter that runs counter to our hopes.

Look, a lot of Obama supporters believe that the world is full of misunderstood people that are only violent because America keeps stopping them from fulfilling their dreams. In a way, this is true... primarily because their dreams involve killing everyone who worships differently or speaks differently or looks differently from them. I can think of no greater setback for the propagation and practice of liberal values worldwide than to reduce the credible military threat we perpetually pose to these freaks that keeps their ambitions at bay.

Now, being constantly on our guard is very expensive, financially and psychologically. As John Kerry astutely observed back in 2004, the ideal way to defend yourself against enemies is to not have any.

One potential way to reduce your number of enemies is to open discussions, address people's grievances, and build interdependence and understanding. Another, much more reliable way is to fucking kill them already. For a comparison of the relative effectiveness of these two approaches, I present western Czechoslovakia for the former and Carthage for the latter.

The problem with the peace-love-flowerpower approach is that it only works for people with legitimate grievances and a sincere desire for reconciliation. It doesn't work with medieval turd-world fucktards or totalitarian dictatorships. And while Obama supporters seem to have no problem thinking of members of the Religious Right as psychotically delusional fundamentalists who are beyond reason or empathy, for some reason they have trouble extending this perception to turban-headed suicide bombers who believe that Allah will reward them with 72 virgins in heaven for killing Jews. You write off the entire American Bible Belt as a bunch of lunatic Klansmen, yet when confronted with an actual honest-to-Allah theocracy complete with stoning of homosexuals and a different set of laws for non-Muslims, you embrace it as an exotic foreign culture that simply needs more understanding. It'd be silly if it wasn't so frustratingly consistent.

But, I promised that these arguments aren't about abstract morality but about direct impact on me personally. How do Middle Eastern wars affect the day-to-day life of an average American? The hard truth of the matter is that they don't. Iran could nuke Israel tomorrow, India can invade Pakistan, Russia can blitz through Eastern Europe, and life in the US would still continue as normal. We'd stand back and go, "Holy shit!", but it wouldn't affect the homeland.

Now, if we choose to enter the fight, then foreign wars become an enormous drain on our economy. Our taxes increase, rationing programs ensue, and our cities get shut down by mobs of hippie protesters.

So, when it comes to foreign wars, we can do one of two things to protect our domestic economy. We can either follow a policy of foreign disengagement, which means we'd let China do whatever it wants to Taiwan, Russia do whatever it wants to Europe, let Iran have its way with Israel, and so on. We don't care anymore, we decide it's too expensive to care. That's the way of George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and Ron Paul. And that's fine, that's one way to approach the situation.

The other way, doctrinized by Teddy Roosevelt and perfected through the Cold War, is to project such immense military might, along with the credible threat of using it in defense of our allies, that we never need to use it because folks like Iran know we'll stop them and destroy them if they try to step out of line. That's Pax Americana, and it's kept the world a more or less stable place for the last 60 years.

The worst thing we can do, from the perspective of the domestic economy (i.e. my perspective), is to uphold our commitments to our allies while at the same time backing down from a stance of overwhelming military might, opting instead for a soft-power approach. That means that our enemies will be less reluctant to start wars, gambling on the possibility that maybe we won't respond — and when we do respond, it hurts us as well as them (granted, it hurts them a liiiittle more). The most effective weapon is one you never have to use, and that only works when your enemies know you have it and will use it on them. It's why muggers never attack cops.

Now, Obama's not going to go the full disengagement route. He is not Ron Paul. He's also not going to go the route of overwhelming military might, because that is far too McCain-ish and Bush-ish and has been historically shown to be far too effective. No, Obama is going to try to go the soft-power approach, attempting to hamstring the ambitions of hostile powers using international committees rather than armies. Obama's response to Russia's invasion of Georgia, for example, is the same as that of France: sending delegations to form multiparty negotiation committees to find mutually satisfactory resolutions and get buy-in from regional stakeholders.

For those of you who weren't watching, Russia's response to France was to have a very cordial, respectful discussion in which Russia ultimately agreed to an organized withdrawal. The French delegation came back to Paris announcing that they had reached a consensus and that the meeting was a success. Of course, Russia's tanks didn't actually go anywhere. This repeated about two or three times before Russia finally got bored and pulled back for cost-cutting reasons. Russia currently still maintains troops in South Ossetia and has declared it an independent nation under Russian protection. The UN issued a strongly worded condemnation.

Come to think of it, maybe this is an argument for voting for Obama. Sooner or later, Russia or China or somebody is going to respond to one of these strongly worded condemnations from the UN with a full-out public mooning on the floor of the UN. And I'd kind of like to see that happen.