Focus :Conservative Responsibility for Iraq and Afghanistan (3-3)

Modified from Jacob. Hornberger:  How can ordinary people kill other people, none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and not expect that it’s going to have an adverse psychological effect on the killers? Where in the Bible does God say that it’s okay to kill people for the sake of democracy?
The federal officials who used the troops for these two imperialist, welfare escapades — along with their conservative and neoconservative cheerleaders — are co-responsible for the horrific consequences of these misadventures. Iraq should never have been invaded and occupied. The Iraqi people, including the countless dead, had a right to be left alone by the Empire.
And as conservatives are hopefully starting to realize, we libertarians were right about Afghanistan too. It was a horrible mistake to employ a military “solution” to address the 9/11 attacks, specifically through the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Most of the Afghan people who have been killed and maimed in Afghanistan had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. They had the right to continue living their lives unmolested by the Empire. All that death and destruction has done nothing but produce a machine of anger and hatred, which has manifested itself in the perpetual threat of terrorist counterattacks, which have then been used to suspend our civil liberties here at home.
Moreover, conservatives are wrong about the troops having had one hand tied behind them. For 10 years, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has been given free rein to kill as many people as it wanted. The problem is that the more people it killed and maimed, the more people became angry and vengeful. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq became the greatest terrorist-producing machine in history.
As the occupation of Afghanistan begins to inevitably wind down, we libertarians must renew our battle to dismantle America’s military empire and restore a constitutional republic to our land. The imperialists, including big government conservatives, will undoubtedly oppose us, even as they do their best to stir up new crises to justify the existence of their big-government military empire. Unfortunately, while doing so, they repeating the refrain of their liberal big-government counterparts: “Please, judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our policies.”