What  got me thinking along these lines was Pat Buchanan's very recent post about Iraq and Afghanistan.  Buchanan has become the premier conservative political pundit flaying the interventionists in the neocons camp. Indeed his conclusion is as savage an attack on other conservatives, as I have ever seen:
    

Make no mistake. Obama is headed for the exit ramp, and the Karzai government and Afghan army will not succeed where that same government and army, backed by 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops, could not succeed.
McCain and the neocons will blame what is coming, a terrible day in Kabul and across Afghanistan, on those who refused to soldier on, no matter the cost in blood and treasure.
But the people who should be indicted by history are not those who, after half a trillion dollars and a decade of bleeding, decided to cut America's losses, but those who stampeded this country into two of the longest and least necessary wars in the history of the republic.

   Now, a personal note: I went to Vietnam in August 1963 as a 23 year old Second Lieutenant in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. I would work on criminal and counter-intelligence investigations in Danang and Saigon as a very junior officer. The first newsmagazine that I can remember featuring a cover story on Vietnam was a magazine in the airplane on my way over there. There were about 12,000 Americans in Vietnam when I first went there in August. In April of 1964 when I was scheduled to return stateside there were around 20,000. 

  The point is: Vietnam snuck up on the American people. The World War II Generation was very much in charge, and the World War Two psychology was set by The Greatest Generation. People thought that America, if it put its mind to it, could go everywhere and do everything. If someone had told me that the day would come when America would abandon Vietnam, in disgrace, having lost 57,000 men and over twice that seriously hurt, I would have thought him crazy. Well, 10 years later we all saw the wreckage. 

  The Wall Street Journal, a paper that I respect, and one that I buy and read on Fridays, regularly accused those who were skeptical about both Iraq and Afghanistan of "Wallowing" in a reminiscence of Vietnam.    

  But I suspect the fact that the total death toll has so far been less that 10,000 Americans, and not some number  much higher than that, is that there are a lot of people 50 years old, and older, who lived through Vietnam and tell themselves, "Never again."

  
   While I suspect that Buchanan is right on the particulars of Iraq and Afghanistan, he fails to address the issue of nuclear weapons. Like everyone else, except this blog, he does not see the terrible threat that nuclear weapons represent to the American heartland. It is not enough to say we will stay home and avoid interventionism.

  Nuclear weapons will not go away. The neocons think that they can make it 1956 again. They cannot. The conservatives think that they can ignore the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons to America's enemies. They cannot.

   Because nuclear weapons reflect engineering talent; in effect IQ, there are a number of places that will be able to develop nuclear capabilities. That threat is inevitable now that 15 year old boys are in school systems across the globe. America, Russia and China, if they demonstrated a united front might be able to stop the future development of nuclear weapons  in yet more countries. 

 

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