FOCUS
Been there, done that. ... Stop meddling

By Richard Rowland

Richard O. Rowland, a retired colonel, heads the Grassroot Institute, a Honolulu think tank.

But all liberty-lovers should question policies that have resulted in our Defense Department becoming an Offense Department, which necessitated the birth of a Department of Homeland Security and the destruction of much personal freedom in the name of "safety."

The founders of our nation were skeptical of foreign alliances and involvements. Rightly so. We now keep troops in Germany, Japan (57 years after World War II), South Korea, Kosovo, Afghanistan, etc., etc. It seems that they go there and they stay and stay and stay.

And our leaders meddle, push and prod. Sooner or later, people there get sick of us.

Some get downright hostile.

Now Iraq is in our crosshairs. We go there with weak justification, having given a president authority he should not, constitutionally, have at all.

If we go, please plan on your son, granddaughters, great-grandsons, etc., serving there for the next 100 or 200 years unless we are run off.

We should not be the world's police. Nor should our local police become hostile hunter/killers to protect our society.

Our leaders are misguided, I fear. These leaders are essentially very good people. But the precedents being established may (will) be used in the not-so-distant future by evil leaders with horrible results.

What is needed is a return by our nation to what our mothers always told us: "Mind your own business." They knew that governing yourself was a full-time job that could always use some improvement and that trying to "govern" others was hopelessly infused with danger.