![\"Breach\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/breach.jpg?w=620\")
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It is interesting to note how many pro-intervention, pro- \u201cboots on the ground\u201d neoconservatives have never served in the military.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m grateful that America treats its veterans better now than it did in decades past. My father was spit on by hippies when he came home from Vietnam. Yet, \u201cthank you for your service<\/em>\u201d comments don\u2019t undo the horrors of war. Gratitude is no substitute for not sending brave young Americans into harm\u2019s way unless it\u2019s absolutely necessary.<\/p>\n President Reagan used open military force about three times in his presidency. President Clinton deployed the military left and right, in one peacekeeping or nation-building exercise after another.\u00a0President Bush II campaigned on a less interventionist foreign policy. He said America needn\u2019t be the world\u2019s policeman, and this view was held by most of the conservative movement in the 1990s.<\/p>\n 9\/11 changed the world, though. Military action was absolutely necessary after those attacks; you can\u2019t let something like that go without response.\u00a0Yet, if you\u2019d told me on 9\/11 that ten years later I\u2019d be in Afghanistan, deployed in what was ostensibly the same war, I wouldn\u2019t have believed you. Yet there I was, on 9\/11\/11, in Afghanistan, as we attempted to turn the country into a pro-western democracy.<\/p>\n