It seems that some feeble minded, idiot brained Republicans in D.C. have been caught up in this "lone wolf" scare that is being spread across the United States these days. As most of our country was celebrating the death of Bin Laden, supposedly enemy number one and supposedly the main reason behind military endeavors in Afganistan and the recent military invasion of his home in Pakistan, there were Republicans working secretly to expand the "Authorization for Use of Military Force" which was passed into law after the September 11 attacks. This bill gives any sitting president the right to use military force to pursue anyone who committed or aided in the attacks and also to invade any country who harbored said inviduals to prevent acts of terrorism. This new bill, extremely vague in its definitions, seeks to expand the rights of the president to use military force against any “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States.” What the hell does that mean? That means that pretty much anyone, anywhere, who acts out against the United States in a terrorist way can be engaged by our military. What can they do? They can detain "belligerents" until the "termination of hostilities" such as they have done with suspected Al Qaeda members in Guantanamo Bay. I have borrowed much of what I said here from an article in the NYTimes which talks about this new bill. I have not read the actual bill, but hearing just these parts of it astounds me that we have elected people who feel they can give the president almost limitless military power. Before we get too far into this, the bill that would expand the president's military authority has not yet been passed and we should do everything in our power to ensure that it does not get passed.
Our government was created in such a way that the president was not supposed to have these sorts of limitless powers. The founding fathers of this country created a system of checks and balances by which any one section of government whether it be judicial, executive, or legislative could not act without the consent of the others and if one such section tried to do so, it could be overruled by the others. By the legislative branch giving limitless military authority to the president, they are in essence circumventing this process that has been in place for hundreds of years to ensure that no one section can act with impunity. Granted, the bill still needs to pass through the House, the Senate, and finally the president. We can only hope that we have some clear headed legislators in D.C. who will see the insanity of this bill and work it out of existence. This bill, if passed, would be a tragedy and a complete reversal of the standards that we have set as a nation (not that we have necessarily been living up to them lately). At one point in our history, it was our goal to promote democracy across the world and to support those through humanitarian missions that have been attacked and subjugated. Now it seems, there are those that want us to be able to attack anywhere in the world for any reason. If this bill passes, there could come a time when a president deems it necessary to attack Iran or even China for that reason due to "belligerents" carrying out terrorist activity that might affect the United States.
Has our country's ego been inflated that much where we still feel we are number one across the whole world, everyone respects us, and we have the right to act however we choose? I have news for those who think so. While we may still have the strongest military, there are scores of country's now who look at our policies with disdain and scorn, who do not respect us simply because we feel as though we can act with impunity, and honestly, there are developing country's now with economies that our stronger than ours. We are not number one anymore and the sooner we realize that, the sooner our image will improve across the world. We need to work on deflating our ego and realize that the whole goal of our country should not be to invade other countries for any reason. In this age of globalization, countries have equalized and while some our still developing and engaged in conflicts, we should not make it our duty to be the global watchdog. Our country needs to re-focus its efforts. At home, we need to re-direct money being spent on the military to creating jobs and abroad, we need to re-focus efforts back to humanitarian aid by helping poor countries to feed their people, rid the developing world of disease, and help those developing countries become part of the global community with technology, innovation, and sustainable living. Whether or not these countries become democratic as we are should not be an issue. Each country should develop a government by which people can lead free lives and as a whole work together with other countries throughout the world.
Before we reach a true global community where war and conflict has truly diminished and people from every country can feel free to work with others, we need to defeat this overly intrusive bill being proposed by House Republicans. We elected these forsaken individuals and now we need to set them straight. How do we do this? We need to contact all of our representatives in both the House and Senate and urge them to defeat this bill and throw it on the trash heap. If we could throw those who proposed it on the trash heap as well, I would say lets do that, but unfortunately we can't. We need to look to the future not as one filled with terror, but one filled with hope and positive engagement across all borders. By letting this bill pass, we will in effect be shutting borders down and alienating ourselves from the global community. We can not maintain our military present across the world and hope to gain respect at the same time. Eventually, the bully gets beaten down and subjugated itself. We are becoming that bully and its time to realize that the sooner we engage positively with others (as hard as that may be) the sooner we can regain some of the respect we once had. Today lets look to a future of unity and peace, not one of terrorism and war.
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