Forty years ago, on a 1967 Face the Nation news episode, Robert F. Kennedy said the following with respect to the Vietnam War:

Do we have the right here in the United States to say that we’re going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, millions of people refugees? Kill women and children, as we have? I very seriously question whether we have that right. Now we’re saying we’re going to fight this so that we don’t have to fight in Thailand. So that we don’t have to fight on the west coast of the United States. So that they won’t move across the Rockies. But do we… our whole moral position changes tremendously.

This is why I like RFK so much, even though I was only about a year old when he was taken from us. But his words about a different war at a different time struck me as I look to the television and newspapers today. The argument proffered in that war was that we had to fight the communists there so that we wouldn’t have to fight them here. The same is said about terrorists in Iraq. It was specious then and remains so today.