Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes that the leading major party presidential candidates have a golden opportunity to put the nation’s bloody-minded foreign policy establishment back in its box, and bring an end to America’s “costly’ wars:

War is not always avoidable. But since the end of the Cold War, every conflict started by the U.S. has been one of choice. America only ever had a serious interest at stake in Afghanistan—to destroy al‐​Qaeda after 9/11 and punish the Taliban government. In that case, however, the U.S. mission should have ended by early 2002, not carried on for nearly two decades.

American policymakers should stop treating war as a first resort, a panacea for international conflict and tragedy. Washington is filled with ivory tower warriors. Their supposedly best intentions have spread chaos and death around the globe.

Bandow notes the trillions of taxpayer dollars spent, and the tens of thousands of American lives (and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives) lost pursuing a neoconservative obsession with nation-building.

Where do the presidential candidates stand on this massive hemorrhaging of blood and treasure? American voters deserve to know.