As for JD, I can assure you that this post has nothing to do with this or any election. One of the reasons I didn’t finish and post this during the 2008 campaign was I didn’t want anyone to get the wrong impression (for what it’s worth, I voted for the anti-war candidate Bob Barr rather than the pro war candidates McCain and Obama). I plan to vote Libertarian in all races this time around because for one I am a Libertarian and two the GOP has done nothing to regain my trust or my vote.

Well said.

You, sir, have great class to write like this.

Since the 2008 election, many on the right are trampling one another in a stampede away from the various Neocon mantras that guided these lemmings into Cheney’s wet dream.

“We were just so angry and scared after 9/11 we couldn’t think straight!” they say. Well my principals weren’t swayed by 9/11. War wasn’t the answer then, it isn’t the answer now, and it will never be the answer. I’m happy to take credit for having been right all along.

You’re incorrect when you say the time has finally come to rethink American foreign policy. That time came about 25 years ago. But it really doesn’t matter, since your sudden distaste for foreign entanglements probably has more to do with our democratically elected, Democratic President and congressional majority than it does with the reality you previously chose to ignore in favor of some wild-eyed “theory” that happened to appease your inner chicken-hawk.

Your disingenuous revelation would have more wisely come on the heals of any of the following: the President asserts an authority to take the country to war unopposed and unfunded; Guantanamo; Abu Ghraib; the truth about America’s torture policy; Blackwater scandals (pick one); No-bid Haliburton contracts (pick one); Tens of Thousands of Dead Civilians (pick one); this list goes on.

I ask you: why now? After all this time, all these lies, all this pointless death and destruction, all these seeds of future enemies planted, why now? While I welcome any and all into the anti-war fold for whatever reason, I’m guessing your about face has more to do with a midterm election than it does a new concern for humanity. Either that or you’re a terrible judge of character, motive and facts as well as a curiously slow learner.

Whatever the case, I’ll look forward to marching with you in the next anti-war rally.

The Iraq war was a continuation of failed policy that had been going on for nigh a century. Instead of fixing the policy, slowly extricating ourselves from building bigger and bigger messes, we chose to double down. It’s a bold strategy, and I think you and I would have agreed back in 2004-2005 that if it had worked, it would have been more than worth the cost in dollars and lives. It didn’t work, though, and I think we both now understand that it wasn’t a failure of men that caused it not to work, but an expected failure of that same continued policy.

As you mention in your opening line, you believe that supporters and opponents of the war have America’s best interests at heart. I agree with you there (and that the same sentiment extends more widely to other debates); an agreement that many don’t share. There are many today who think that Obama’s goal is to damage America. I, rather, think that he’s disastrously wrong, but not deliberatively evil. Thus, when I had the Point/Counterpoint with you, I tried to show that our foreign policy won’t and can’t work, not that the intentions were faulty. Intentions and results aren’t identical, and extending that concept from the welfare state to the military arena is what truly turned me from a small-government conservative into an anti-government libertarian.

Good post. Thanks for sharing your story. Too many people are unwilling to evaluate some of these deeply-held beliefs, and avoid contrary evidence rather than let it threaten their worldview. That you did so — and that you admitted the change — speaks well of you.