Being the world's policeman makes limited government impossible

Being the world's policeman makes limited government impossible
DeMint's Conundrum
by Jack Hunter "Southern Avenger"

Jim DeMint is one of my favorite Republicans. The senator's unwavering opposition to government spending — from "stimulus" and national healthcare to auditing the Federal Reserve — just warms my conservative heart. That is until he breaks it again, as he always does, by going back to supporting the biggest government program of them all.

On the day before DeMint appeared on Fox News in support of the tens of thousands of anti-government protesters who gathered on 9/12 in Washington, D.C., he gave the following comments on the Senate floor: "Today marks the eighth anniversary of America's war on terror ... It's crucial to remember now, as the terror and tragedy of that day recedes into the past, this war did not begin with the 9/11 attacks or when we sent troops to Afghanistan, and it will not end when we defeat terrorists on any battlefield. Our goal cannot be merely to end one war but to win the war on terror. We will not win trying to appease the grievances of our enemies. They do not hate our policies; they hate us, our freedoms, and our way of life."

DeMint could not be more wrong.

Do Islamic terrorists find American democracy weak, our culture too libertine, and our comparative materialism repugnant? They sure do, and their Koran even says all sorts of nasty stuff about Christians, Jews, and other infidels. But blaming 9/11 or the current terrorist threat exclusively on the anti-Western prejudice of Islamists is like blaming alcoholism on an addictive personality while completely ignoring the substance of the problem — the alcohol.

The overwhelming, primary motivator for Islamic terrorism is our interventionist foreign policy. Our own government intelligence makes this crystal clear. A would-be Islamic terrorist might cringe over Playboy or gay marriage in a faraway land, but the substance of his hatred is the presence and activity of the U.S. in his homeland.

In the 1990s, the U.N. estimated that over a half-million Iraqi children had died as a result of U.S. sanctions; the Iraq War alone has resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 100,000 and one million Iraqi civilian casualties. Now, the number of American "infidels" on Muslim holy land — a primary complaint of Osama Bin Laden in 2001 — has now increased tenfold.

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