Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I have tried on several occasions to describe the hypocrisy of the left, but each time I have found it nearly impossible to sum it up in just one article. Though I was able to point out the left’s hypocrisy when it came to war and peace, with my article “Partisan Hypocrisy.” I have also noticed that while the left acts as if they are the polar opposites of the neoconservatives on the right, they seem to have much in common. I feel that my observation has been reinforced, ever since Donald Trump announced our withdrawal from Syria.

I can honestly say that this is by far one of the best moves made by the Trump administration. I thought from the very beginning that it was foolhardy to get involved in the Syrian Civil War. To begin with, civil wars are always messy. You have brother against brother. Cousin against cousin. In some cases, you even have fathers against sons. They are by far the ugliest conflicts you could ever find yourself in, especially in Syria where you really can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. Then Obama had to make us look like fools with his famous Red Line speech where he told the Assad regime not to cross it by utilizing chemical weapons. What he failed to understand was that whenever you give a warning the runs along the lines of “Or else” someone is eventually going to respond with “Or else, what?”

Personally, I think Trump should have pulled us out of Syria, as soon as he took office, instead of launching a series of pointless missile attacks against the Assad Regime. Yet, the one good thing that I can say about all this is that Trump at least had an objective in mind, which was to neutralize the Isis threat in that country. Now that the objective has been met, he decided that now is the time to withdraw, instead of getting ourselves into the same nation-building debacle that we continue to find ourselves in with Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, neoconservatives such as John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor and congressmen, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, seem to hate the idea of Trump pulling us out of a conflict that will amount to nothing more than fighting a never-ending a war. On top of that we will end up spending billions on Nation-Building, which has proven time and time again to be pointless and downright wasteful.

This is the kind of nonsense that I have come to expect from the neoconservatives, since they seem to have an unsatisfiable blood-lust that requires sending more of our young to lay down their lives in pointless conflicts. What surprises me is that with the exception of Tucker Carlson, very few people have pointed out the hypocrisy of Democrats such as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Nancy Pelosi, Tim Cain and left-wing commentator Rachael Maddow for joining the neoconservatives in criticizing Trump’s plan for troop removal. There were some Democrats such as Rep. Ro Khanna who supported Trump’s withdrawal plan, but it seems like most of the mainstream Democrats criticized Trump for wanting to pull out. This comes as no surprise to me, since I have known for a long time that the Democrats are the biggest hypocrites when it comes to war and peace. Though, I thought we would have seen more people scratch their heads in confusion before asking “Weren’t the Democrats waving peace signs, not too long ago?”

I have already pointed out on several occasions that most of the major wars and military conflicts of the twentieth century happened under Democratic administrations. People also seem to forget that most Democrats supported military action in both Afghanistan and the early days of the war in Iraq. It wasn’t until those two wars drug on and became unpopular with the public that the Democrats really got on an anti-war kick.

While there were libertarians who wanted to alley themselves with the anti-war organizations of the Bush era, I could never bring myself to trust them, even after I got over my initial Neo-libertarian phase when I supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem was that they seemed just a little too partisan for my tastes. I don’t recall any of these people protesting outside the Whitehouse during one of Bill Clinton’s mini-wars. I also find it telling that many of these groups would wave pictures of Che Guevara alongside their peace signs. Nothing says peace like a mass murdering communist who wanted to nuke America into the stone-age. The very fact these moments vanished off the face of the earth when Obama was elected pretty much proves my point about these groups being entirely partisan. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, there were few people on the left who criticized our Noble Peace Prize winning president for his series of military interventions, which in some cases helped destabilize the very regions that he was trying to aid.

War mongering isn’t even the only thing that leftists and neocons have in common. I remember all the leftists who compared George W. Bush to Hitler for his War on Terror policies, but they didn’t seem to have a problem with these same measures when they were enforced under Barrack “The Anointed One” Obama. Despite what the Democrats promised us, The Patriot Act and several souped-up versions of it remained on the books, while the Monte Christo style prisons, such as Guantanamo Bay remained open. This shows that there is very little difference between the two ideologies. Despite what either side would claim, both leftists and neoconservatives are cut from the same cloth.

Update: Since I first wrote this article, Iran has taken it upon themselves to attack a Japanese oil tanker and has shot down an American drone, which they claimed had invaded their airspace. Not too long after the drone had been shot down the neoconservatives in Trump’s administration tried to convince him to respond with an airstrike. Trump claims that he was onboard with these measures, until he asked what the causality rate would have been for the Iranian people. When his staff told him that approximately a hundred and fifty people would parish with these airstrikes, Trump decided to call them off, since the destruction of an unmanned drone didn’t really call for the deaths of a hundred and fifty people. Once again, the president was criticized by the neocons and leftists, even though his reasons for not wanting to bomb Iran should have seemed reasonable to anybody who has the ability to use logic and reason. Unfortunately, neither the warmongers on the left nor the neocons on the right have the ability to see past their lust for war.