Throw the bums out (peacefully, if possible)

The casual reader might find my previous post – an advocacy of pre-emptive war – to be a bit cavalier. And it certainly is. The case I mentioned then (America’s action to invade Iraq and impose regime change by force) is a rare one, and it has been bloody expensive. It has cost thousands of good Americans their lives, and it’s cost tremendous political capital and huge heaps of cash.

But I maintain: It was worth it, and I hold to what I wrote before. Today we’re standing by idly and allowing North Korea, Iran or other psychopathic-leaning governments to develop and trade nuclear weapons – we cannot do that and expect that nothing bad will come. Even if the only other option is a full-scale invasion.

Fortunately, full-scale invasion is not the only other option. Non-violent revolution and peaceful regime change has happened before and it ought to be tried again.

My favorite example is that of Poland. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II conspired, in the 1980s, to assist the Polish Solidarity movement in its efforts to drive out that nation’s Soviet oppressors.

With financial, moral and logistical support from the "Troika" of anti-communists, Solidarity swept in and ran the Reds out of town. And Poland was the better for it – and the Polish government remembers. That’s one reason these days they’re begging us to install the missile defense system we’ve proposed, even if the Russians disapprove. They remember how “benevolent” the Russians were from 1939 to 1989.

The United States has no beef with most Iranians, nor with most North Koreans. Most world citizens have little interest in destroying Israel or launching an ICBM at any target in the same hemisphere as the United States. It’s the lunatic governments in those countries that we cannot afford to trust.

Also, it’s the normal folks in those countries that suffer the most under their current governments. And it’s those folks that have the most to gain by regime change.

The United States ought to have military contingencies for invasions of those, and all other threatening countries, contingencies that we hope we’ll never have to use. And right now, we ought to be employing clever, dedicated, tenacious plans to empower the liberty-hungry friends we have all over the world. We ought to be helping North Korean and Iranian citizens to throw out the bums that are oppressing them and threatening us.

In doing so, we would be bringing regime change without the bullets.