It's Hard to Look Back with Blinders On

"The very concept of destroying Hezbollah or dismantling it is based on a faulty belief that it is somehow external to the fiber of Lebanon. It is not." This sums up the folly of the West's entire Middle East strategy nicely, doesn't it?

As we all know, a dangerous precedent was set over fifty years ago with the Korean War. Our country turned its back on its beloved Constitution to wage a war in the name of "security." Since then we have committed countless troops and trillions of dollars to unconstitutional causes, including myriad conflicts in the Middle East.

When will this end? We must get back on the right path. Israel has a different constitution than we do, obviously, and I won't claim to know anything about it, but if this were a United States issue what we should have done was officially declare war on Lebanon because they are the legitimate government that is inextricably tied to a terrorist organization.

This is also what we should have done in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Taliban was an official government, so we had every right to declare war, yet we didn't. We circumvented the Constitution in the name of expediency. Saddam was obviously the official ruler of Iraq, so we should have declared war against Iraq if our nation was seriously in danger (of course, we know now that it wasn't).

This issue is one where I am proudly conservative. We can't keep pushing the limits of how we declare war. There is a specific method expressly detailed in our Constitution that we haven't followed since WWII. Every "military action" since "the big one" has technically been unconstitutional. We've become so ambivalent towards wiping our butts with the Constitution that we are currently waging a war against an abstract idea! Seriously, this has gone waaaaaay to far.

The reason why groups like Hezbollah get strong footholds in the Middle East is because they offer very real services that common folks would otherwise go without. They bring a modicum of order to madness. If we truly want to compete with that we have to be more orderly and offer more hope than they do. How can we possibly expect ordinary people in the throws of chaos to embrace our ideals if we can't even live by them?