Lux Lucet

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

– John Quincy Adams

Stay out of foreign wars. Time was when Americans, from then least of them to the greatest of them, understood this simple, Biblical maxim of foreign policy.

But beginning with William McKinley and the Spanish American War in 1898, America got into the vulgar business of empire. Over the following century, the language of war, once foreign to American patriots, became the nation’s native tongue.

I was born during the Vietnam war. As a nine year old, I recall watching the nightly news as a helicopter evacuated the last remaining personnel from US embassy in Saigon, signaling the end of US intervention there.

Seven years later there was the intervention in Grenada.

In October 1983, America was shocked to hear that 241 Marines were killed in their barracks by a suicide bomber driving a truck.

In the late 90’s as the Soviet Union went belly up, war hawks went into panic mode as talk of a “peace dividend” was in the air.

There were no more monsters. What’s an interventionist to do?

But never underestimate a globalist. Indeed, they are a determined lot.

And it wasn’t long before the found just what they were looking for in the person of former ally Saddam Hussein.

Gulf War I quickly followed.

Then came Somalia, the Balkans, Gulf War II, Afghanistan, Libya, and more drone strikes and covert interventions than I could begin to name.

All of it, naturally, in the name of defending “our freedoms,” which were daily being consumed by the burgeoning security state fostered by the same folks who brought us the wars.

Now as I write Thursday night, across my phone comes the headline, “Trump launches attack on Syria with more than 50 tomahawk missiles.”

The search for monsters once again has found its mark.