STOSSEL: We need to ask questions about U.S. military spending

The U.S. is out of Afghanistan. Good. We should have gotten out before.

Our involvement there was America’s longest war, longer than the Civil War, First World War and Second World War combined. We accomplished little good and plenty of bad. Tens of thousands killed. A trillion dollars spent.

Now the Taliban wear American uniforms and fly American planes.

Hawks say, “If we just stayed a little longer ….” It’s not true.

“No longer would we canonize George Washington’s warning against entangling alliances,” writes Glaser. “Or extol the counsel of John Quincy Adams that America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.’”

Now we repeatedly go abroad, searching for monsters. Many Americans believe the military and our use of military force shrank after WWII and after the Soviet Union collapsed. But it’s not true either.

“The United States has engaged in more military interventions in the past 30 years than it had in the preceding 190 years altogether,” Glaser points out.

We post soldiers all over the world: 50,000 in Japan; 35,000 in Germany; 26,000 in South Korea. Why? Is it America’s job to protect South Korea from North Korea? Taiwan from China? Israel from Iran?