Article by FLN Staff.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) weighed in on the recent news from the Washington Post that President Trump wants a massive, expensive military parade in Washington, D.C. Sen. Paul says he’s all for it; after the troops come home from Afghanistan.

“Though the martial image of high-stepping soldiers is not one I tend to associate with our nation’s Founders’ distrust of a standing Army, I’m not against a victory celebration. So I propose we declare victory in Afghanistan, bring home our 14,000 troops and hold a victory parade,” Sen. Paul wrote in an op-ed to Fox News. He argues that victory is elusive, because the definition keeps changing, and says that, “If victory requires the disparate tribes and regional factions of Afghanistan to have more allegiance to a regime in Kabul than to their local tribal leaders, then victory will never come.”

The war in Afghanistan has continued for 16 years, and even though the people responsible for 9/11, including Bin Laden, are long dead, the war continues. Paul argues that in a place like Afghanistan, that will have to do, as there will be no grand surrender on a battleship like the end of World War II.

He concludes, “So, by all means, a parade – yes!  As long as it is a victory parade heralding an end to America’s longest war.”

Image Credit: By Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Rand Paul) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons