(fyi: For future entries into the counterconservatism series, i'll just put the "CC" abbreviation in the title.)

Last summer you might have seen the Carneymobile or the Pigmobile or the Oreomobile roving around New Hampshire from the good people at Priorities New Hampshire. While some people I knew on the right weren't exactly big fans of the group (we're at war, support our troops, stay the course, blah blah blah), despite the fact that the vast bulk of government waste and largesse goes to unneeded military expenditures.

Right now, our defense budget is nearly equal to the rest of the world COMBINED. And as you can see at the Priorities New Hampshire website, a little more than half of our government spending (around 4% of our GNP) is spent on military expenditures.

Yet, we're not a nation bent on military conquest. The last territorial expansion we had as a country that came from a military conflict was the Spanish American War in 1900. However, if look back at countries in the past who were the undisputed military superpower of their day (the Roman Empire, 1600s Spain, Victorian England, etc.), they started to decline when they stopped expanding. If it weren't for World War II and the Cold War, we would have declined as a nation a long time ago with our current geopolitical thinking.

So, what is our military there for? You can say it's there to help keep us safe, but its impact against threats from nation states since the end of the cold war have been mixed (definately not enough to eliminate threats from Iran or North Korea), and it's been able to do nearly nothing against the hydra of Al Qaeda, our real #1 threat today: a multibillion dollar Aircraft Carrier group can't destroy a guy with a few bucks of explosives strapped to his chest who can blend into a population and thinks he's on a mission from god.

With that said, let me get to my point...

If we as a country could spend money on peace rather than war more cost effectively for the purpose of spending money on war in the first place (security and force projection), how can any fiscal conservative be a "hawk"?

The ideas and institutions are already there. Americorps, Dennis Kucinich'es Department of Peace, heck, even the United Nations if we can reform it with some teeth.

I will bet with anyone that for every $1 spent on war, the same thing can be accomplished with a dime spent on peaceful initiatives, whether it's diplomacy or cultural exchange or just a helping hand to those who might eventually resent us and attack us for that resentment.

If we're going to destroy Al Qaeda, we need to see them as weeds. Weeds cannot be destroyed directly, if the environment for them to grow still exists they'll just come back.

We need to focus in on the breeding grounds of terror first and fight that environment with our ideas and compassion before we'll make any headway towards eliminating those weeds, and hopefully the best impetus to convince conservative voters of that lies in their wallets.