Subject: Re: Dope?
You don't see a difference between going after Bin Laden, who actually orchestrated a physical attack against the United States, and someone who (like thousands of other people) was involved in drug trafficking? Right....

Aha, so you *don't* mind nation-states taking care of business. So much for "the rules".

Bah. The USSR has been gone for three decades now - and Europe has been "un-exhausted" for far longer - and the Pax has held.

Nice try. The Europeans couldn't project a light bulb's worth of power to their neighbor's row house across the street. They have no navies and have gutted their militaries.

The fact that activity was limited to what could be done covertly is hardly a disappointment - it's something to be celebrated from the rooftops. We have spent many decades free from Clausewitz's world where it was common for nations to use war as just another tool for achieving political aims, no different than any other.

So again, you're fine with invading other countries. You're just concerned with the a) degree of it and b) how loud it gets. That's not an endorsement of "the rules" in any way. Quite the opposite.

Clausewitz's most famous quote is that "war is the continuation of politics by other means" and it tends to be viewed as an endorsement of the substitution of the former for the latter. It isn't. Instead it's a realization that nation-states interact with one another across several different boundaries and using different tools but always across the same continuum.