Reading a letter to the editor in the St. Louis Post Dispatch I caught this one. Wish I had written it myself.
Can’t we heed the warning?
Ultra-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer is a trained psychiatrist, which explains his most recent psychobabble regarding the president’s ability as commander in chief (“Obama: the drone warrior,” June 3). Mr. Krauthammer takes President Barack Obama to task for using drones to target and kill terrorists. You see, Mr. Krauthammer, like many of his hawkish fellow conservatives who never served in the military yet fashion themselves as experts on war fighting, believes the president should put our troops on the ground and in mortal danger to capture, remove and interrogate (waterboard?) terrorists.As I recall, Republicans similarly excoriated President Bill Clinton for his air-bombing campaign in Yugoslavia that ended that war. Perhaps conservatives still are embarrassed that their last Republican president famously mused that he didn’t worry about Osama bin Laden and wasn’t able to take down, much less capture and interrogate, the architect of the worst attack on our soil in history. So they can only fantasize that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually brought down bin Laden.
Seems to me that Republicans have become too cozy with the idea that full-scale ground wars and all the business they create for defense contractors constitute our most effective economic tool. Ironically, it was a cherished Republican president and Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously warned us of the dangers of an expanding military-industrial complex.
Tom O’Connor, St. Louis County