Posts in "Doug Bandow"

By Brian Beyer at 2:18PM

May 21, 2010

Doug Bandow is Right On

In my recent article, "Human Beings Aren't Pawns," I pondered several questions:

If the neocons were genuine about their compassion concerning basic human rights and an open democracy, where are they now? Why are they not pressuring President Obama to extend support to the red shirts in Bangkok? Why did they limit their support to the Iranian Green Movement?

The basic gist of the article is that, while claiming to be interested in the basic human rights of the Iranian people, neoconservatives saw them as mere pawns in order to fulfill their desires for regime change.

Doug Bandow, in his article at the National Interest, writes critically of US military intervention:

It’s time to reverse the presumption of U.S. policy. Rather than assume American involvement in other nations’ conflicts, Washington should plan to keep out. Rather than position U.S. military personnel to intervene promiscuously half a world away, America should redeploy its military to defend the United States.
Americans will long remain active in East Asia. But U.S. interests do not require military plans to intervene in local strife, whether within or among nations. Thailand demonstrates how the region’s most likely problems lie well beyond America’s control.

US policymakers should heed his advice.

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By Matt Fay at 2:04AM

May 4, 2009

GOP Still Trying to Claim National Security Cred

Doug Bandow, former special assistant for policy in the Reagan administration and currently senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses recent Republican attempts to play the national security card on the Obama administration, as well as the Democrats in congress. Writing at the Cato-@-Liberty blog, Bandow says,

I have a lot of bad things to say about both parties on foreign as well as domestic policy. But it’s hard for me to imagine the previous eight years of Republican governance as a golden era for national security.

First there was 9/11. Perhaps it is too much to expect the Bush administration to have prevented the terrorist atrocity, but the administration did nothing over the Clinton administration to improve American defenses to prevent such attacks. Then there was diverting troops and attention from Afghanistan before that war was finished, to invade Iraq. The Iraq debacle occupies a category all its own. Policy towards North Korea was spectacularly misguided and incompetent: refusing to talk to the North for years as it generated nuclear materials, before rushing to embrace Pyongyang while offering few immediate benefits to entice the North to change its behavior. The results of this strategy were, unsurprisingly, negligible.

Defend America?......Why Not?

Doug Bandow, a former policy specialist in the Reagan Administration, has an excellent post over at the Campaign for Liberty blog. His critique of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that American global domination is the ultimate good for the world at large is a warning that every American needs to take heed of. The greatest sacrilege in American politics is to not support America's soldiers who are supposedly defending "freedom" in the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is, of course, ridiculous.
Read more here

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