Gary Johnson The Anti-War 2012 Candidate

If you are one of the 60% who believe that the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, you have only one candidate that will be on the Presidential ballot in November who will put an immediate end to the hostilities; Gary Johnson.

The choice is yours; are you going to vote your conscience or vote for a candidate who will continue the killing of American soldiers?

Politico

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is branding himself as the anti-war candidate of the 2012 campaign, dismissing both President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as standard-bearers for “interventionism.”

Johnson, who dropped out of the GOP primary and is now seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination, said opposition to the war in Afghanistan represents a potent force in presidential politics — one that neither major-party candidate is in a position to channel.

“Get out tomorrow,” Johnson said in an interview with POLITICO. “We should have gotten out of Afghanistan 11 years ago. Eleven years ago! Romney is saying we should stay in Afghanistan until the mission is accomplished. What does that mean?”

Obama, on the other hand, has “doubled down” on an unpopular and directionless war, Johnson said. What’s more, he warned that the White House could try to gain electoral points with a strike on Iran before the November election out of a “political calculation … that bombing Iran shows strength.”

If Johnson wins the Libertarian nomination next month, he would become the only general-election candidate with a down-the-line stance against the unpopular war. For a long-shot third-party candidate, who will essentially be campaigning for a place in the fall debates, Afghanistan is conceivably the kind of issue that could draw national attention to an underdog effort.

Asked if he believed the country was more secure now than it was when Obama took office, Johnson argued that intervention in Afghanistan — which he initially supported — and the war in Iraq have had a strongly negative effect on national security.

“Is it safer today, as opposed to after 9-11? No. I think we’ve made more enemies,” he said. “What we do, I think, is create 100 million enemies that we wouldn’t have.”

Citing the alleged massacre of Afghan civilians by U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, Johnson asked: “What does that do to that village and to Afghanistan and what they think about America?”

Gary Johnson On The Issues - Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy

Maintaining a strong national defense is the most basic of the federal government’s responsibilities. However, building schools, roads, and hospitals in other countries are not among those basic obligations. Yet that is exactly what we have been doing for much of the past 10 years.

Given trillion-dollar deficits, America simply cannot afford to be engaged in foreign policy programs that are not clearly protecting U.S. interests. There is nation-building and rebuilding to be done right here at home.

Our military should remain the most potent force for good on Earth. To do this, we should resort to military action as the last option and only as provided in the Constitution.

Bring the Troops Home
AMERICAN MILITARY ACTIVITIES IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, AND, now, Libya should end, our troops returned home, and the focus of our foreign policy reoriented toward the protection of U.S. citizens and interests.

* With Osama bin Laden now killed and after 10 years of fighting, U.S. forces should leave Afghanistan's challenges to the Afghan people.
* Saddam Hussein has been out of power in Iraq for nearly eight years. America must leave so Iraq can have a chance to grow into a responsible member of the world community.
* Without a clear goal for our military actions in Libya, fighting rages on, and the American people are footing the bill.
* Decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American troops remain scattered throughout Europe. It is time to reevaluate these deployments.
* The U.S. must make better use of military alliances which allow greater sharing of the human and financial burdens at less cost of protecting national interests.

Lead By Example
AMERICA CAN USE 'SOFT POWER' AS EFFECTIVELY as 'hard power' to further our foreign policy goals.

* No criminal or terrorist suspect captured by the U.S. should be subject to physical or psychological torture.
* Individuals incarcerated unjustly by the U.S. should have the ability to seek compensation through the courts.
* Individuals detained by the U.S., whether it be at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere, must be given due process via the courts or military tribunals, and must not be held indefinitely without regard to those fundamental processes.