To Pacifists of Every Stripe:

Sam Adams:

"In a state of tranquillity, wealth, and luxury, our descendants would forget the arts of war and the noble activity and zeal which made their ancestors invincible. Every art of corruption would be employed to loosen the bond of union which renders our resistance formidable. When the spirit of liberty, which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms, is extinct, our numbers will accelerate our ruin and render us easier victims to tyranny. If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom—go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

There is no doubt that our founding fathers understood the slow insidious nature of corruption and tyranny. While they would not have condoned an intentional effort to nation-build or look for trouble in the world, they knew, inevitably, that tyrants and despotism would seek the destruction of liberty and free will wherever it exists. They were prepared to defend against assaults upon liberty and free will be it within our borders, within our own government, or by encroachments from abroad.

The cause of liberty is the cause of our humanity. God gave to us His design for personal liberty which is the exercise of "free will". God also tells us that we are our brother's keeper. Hence, we owe to the creator of humanity from which all liberty springs, the debt of supporting and defending freedom when and where it comes under assault by tyrants who intend, given the chance, to steal it from us all.

Isolationist policies are short sighted and supremely selfish. To pretend that we can live with liberty and free will as though in a vacuum, is to say to hell with the world, I've got mine -- you get your own. Where ever people that seek the liberty to exercise free will -- absent tyranny and oppression -- are, we must lend our support by whatever means possible. It may not, and in reality can not, always be military help, but military help should never be ruled out. We form alliances in the world with the governments of liberty loving peoples. If their governments fail them and the people lose liberty to despots and tyrants, then we, the United States of America, have a moral obligation to help them regain their freedom. Their loss of liberty will eventually have an affect on our own. In the past, and I point to Iran as just one example, we have let the people who desire the personal liberty to exercise their free will down, and the world is paying the price for it. In an ideologically unified and perfect world -- UTOPIA -- there would be no need for military interventions; but we have no such world, never have and never will. So for those of you believing that the United States of America -- Ronald Wilson Reagan's shining city upon a hill, our beacon of safe harbour to the world -- should gain for itself safety by forsaking the causes of liberty elsewhere, then you neither understand liberty nor do you deserve to have it.