← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 13241 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2004-04-19
2004-04-19 20:43 | User Profile
It looks like the frog has reached the middle of the river, and the scorpion is trying to decide whether to sting or to jump onto yet another willing host...
[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/politics/19CONS.html?ex=1082952000&en=3ead1edf3c2212dd&ei=5062[/url]
Lack of Resolution in Iraq Finds Conservatives Divided By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: April 19, 2004
growing faction of conservatives is voicing doubts about a prolonged United States military involvement in Iraq, putting hawkish neoconservatives on the defensive and posing questions for President Bush about the degree of support he can expect from his political base.
The continuing violence and mounting casualties in Iraq have given new strength to the traditional conservative doubts about using American military power to remake other countries and about the potential for Western-style democracy without a Western cultural foundation. In in the eyes of many conservatives, the Iraqi resistance has discredited the more hawkish neoconservatives ââ¬â a group closely identified with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard.
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Considered descendants of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals who switched from the political left to the right at the height of the cold war, the neoconservatives are defined largely by their conviction that American military power can be a force for good in the world. They championed the invasion of Iraq as a way to turn that country into a bastion of democracy in the Middle East.
"In late May of last year, we neoconservatives were hailed as great visionaries," said Kenneth R. Weinstein, chief operating officer of the Hudson Institute, a center of neoconservative thinking. "Now we are embattled, both within the conservative movement and in the battle over postwar planning.
"Those of us who favored a more muscular approach to American foreign policy and a more Wilsonian view of our efforts in Iraq find ourselves pitted against more traditional conservatives, who have more isolationist instincts to begin with, and they are more willing to say, `Bring the boys home,' " Mr. Weinstein said.
Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative stalwart and the dean of conservative direct mail, said the Iraq war had created an unusual schism. "I can't think of any other issue that has divided conservatives as much as this issue in my political lifetime," Mr. Viguerie said.
Recent events, he said, "call into question how conservatives see the White House. It doesn't look like the White House is as astute as we thought they were."
Although Mr. Bush appears to be sticking to the neoconservative view, the growing skepticism among some conservatives about the Iraqi occupation is upending some of the familiar dynamics of left and right. To be sure, both sides have urged swift and decisive retaliation against the Iraqi insurgents in the short term, but some on the right are beginning to support a withdrawal as soon as is practical, while some Democrats, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the likely presidential nominee, have called for sending more troops to Iraq.
In an editorial in this week's issue of The Weekly Standard, Mr. Kristol applauded Mr. Kerry's stance.
Referring to the conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, an outspoken opponent of the war and occupation, Mr. Kristol said in an interview on Friday: "I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right. If you read the last few issues of The Weekly Standard, it has as much or more in common with the liberal hawks than with traditional conservatives."
In contrast, this week's issue of National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley and a standard-bearer for mainstream conservatives, adopted a newly skeptical tone toward the neoconservatives and toward the occupation. In an editorial titled "An End to Illusion," the Bush administration was described as having "a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations."
The editorial criticized the administration as having "an underestimation of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is still fundamentally a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny."
The editorial described that error as "Wilsonian," another term for the neoconservatives' faith that United States military power can improve the world and a label associated with the liberal internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson.
"The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign policy thought in recent years," the editorial continued, adding, "As we have seen in Iraq, the world isn't as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it."
The editorial was careful to emphasize that the war served legitimate United States interests and that violence against Americans in Iraq deserved harsh retribution. But it concluded: "It is the Iraqis who have to save Iraq. It is their country, not ours."
Some conservatives who focus on limited government and lower taxes said they were also worried about the political costs of an extended occupation of Iraq.
"We don't want to put troops into a situation that is increasingly a public-relations problem for the president," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a group of conservative political donors. "No one wants body bags coming home in September and October."
So far President Bush appears to be sticking to Wilsonian goals. "We're changing the world," he said last week in a White House news conference, defending the occupation and pledging to maintain a military involvement after the planned June 30 handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi governing body. "My job as the president is to lead this nation into making the world a better place."
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Some of the main conservative opponents of the invasion, including Mr. Buchanan and the libertarian Cato Institute ââ¬â were quiet after the war began but have now renewed their criticism.
In his syndicated column last week, Mr. Buchanan, who argued against the invasion on the grounds that the United States should use military force only to defend its vital interests, posed a series of questions: "Do we go in deeper, or do we cut our losses and look for the nearest exit? How much blood and treasure are we willing to invest in democracy in Baghdad, and for how long? Is a democratic Iraq vital to our security? What assurances are there that we can win this war?"
David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said conservatives were becoming more receptive to Mr. Buchanan's arguments against the neoconservatives. "Now that they see Iraq edging into a nation-building kind of thing, conservatives are more skeptical," Mr. Keene said. "It isn't that someone went out and rhetorically beat the neoconservatives in an argument. It's just that they went out and tested their scheme against reality on the ground."
In a recent interview, Representative John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, one of the few Republicans who voted against the invasion, said he believed the administration should seek an exit soon. "I think we should announce to the world that no country has come close to doing as much for Iraq as we have, but there are a significant number of people who don't appreciate what we have done," Mr. Duncan said. "I think we should get on out, we should celebrate victory and we should leave."
Conservatives who question the occupation can point to a long history of opposition from the right to United States military action overseas. Conservatives opposed Wilson's entry into World War I, and many opposed United States involvement in World War II until after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
But the cold war rallied conservatives around the military interventions abroad, and the protests of the Vietnam War era solidified the reputations of conservatives as hawks and liberals as doves. Still, even if some conservatives appeared to be returning to the movement's more isolationist roots, Mr. Kristol said he was undeterred.
"If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me, too," he said.
Recalling a famous saying of his father, the neoconservative pioneer Irving Kristol, that a neoconservative was "a liberal who has been mugged by reality," the younger Mr. Kristol joked that now they might end up as neoliberals ââ¬â defined as "neoconservatives who had been mugged by reality in Iraq."
2004-04-19 21:08 | User Profile
An excellent and encouraging read. Go to see the NYT publish this piece.
2004-04-20 02:29 | User Profile
Typical behavior of these tribal parasites. Once you have sucked your victim dry it's time to move on to the next one. :caiphas: = :dung:
2004-04-20 18:45 | User Profile
[QUOTE=weisbrot]In contrast, this week's issue of National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley and a standard-bearer for mainstream conservatives, adopted a newly skeptical tone toward the neoconservatives and toward the occupation. In an editorial titled "An End to Illusion," the Bush administration was described as having "a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations."[/QUOTE] I wonder what the Pod has to say about this? Must be some fascinating internal politics going on at NR.
2004-04-23 06:19 | User Profile
AY,
Still, the neos managed to jump ship from McCain to Bush without breaking stride, so if Bush outlives his usefulness, we'll be seeing Weekly Standard columns informing us what a great "conservative" John Kerry is.
I hope this happen. I'd love to hear the talkradio whores and lunatics try to explain and justify on why their idiot listeners now have to support Kerry after all the bootlicking they have done for "W." :lol:
Somehow, I don't think they would succeed, despite the stupidity of their "vast listening audience."(s) Hell, even "freepers" aren't that stupid.
I can dream, though. It would be the political version of the scene from the "James Bond" film "Thunderball" when "Largo" decides that he is about to be caught by the Navy and dumps the rear part of his yaht, turning the front part into a hydrofoil, with the idiots above left on the stern to be blown up. :lol:
2004-04-23 19:06 | User Profile
Here is an article from Fortune magazine by the Cato Institute's Doug Bandow entitled "A Conservative Case for Voting Democratic":
[url]http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/0,15114,611869,00.html[/url]
[B]A Conservative Case for Voting Democratic[/B] [I]Give either party complete control of government, and the vaults are quickly emptied.[/I] By Doug Bandow
Republicans have long claimed to be fiscal tightwads and railed against deficit spending. But this year big-spending George W. Bush and the GOP Congress turned a budget surplus into a $477 billion deficit. There are few programs at which they have not thrown money: massive farm subsidies, an expensive new Medicare drug benefit, thousands of pork-barrel projects, dubious homeland-security grants, expansion of Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, even new foreign-aid programs. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that in 2003 "government spending exceeded $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II."
Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush's latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis?
Vote Democratic.
Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can "govern"ââ¬âwhich means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That's one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers.
Consider the record. William Niskanen, former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has put together a fascinating analysis of government spending since 1953. Real federal outlays grew fastest, 4.8% annually, in the Kennedy-Johnson years, with Congress under Democratic control. The second-fastest rise, 4.4%, occurred with George W. Bush during Republican rule. The third-biggest spending explosion, 3.7%, was during the Carter administration, a time of Democratic control. In contrast, the greatest fiscal stringency, 0.4%, occurred during the Eisenhower years. The second-best period of fiscal restraint, 0.9%, was in the Clinton era. Next came the Nixon-Ford years, at 2.5%, and Ronald Reagan's presidency, at 3.3%. All were years of shared partisan control.
Bush officials argue that it is unfair to count military spending, but Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan also faced international challenges that impeded their domestic plans. Moreover, if you do strip out military spending and consider only the domestic record, GOP chief executives emerge in an even worse light. In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually, according to Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon. At least the latter two, in contrast to Bush, faced hostile Congresses.
Given the generally woeful record of Republican Presidents, the best combination may be a Democratic chief executive and Republican legislature. It may also be the only combination that's feasible, since in 2004 at least, it will be difficult to overturn Republican congressional control: Redistricting has encouraged electoral stasis in the House, while far more Democrats face reelection in the Senate. Thus, the only way we can realistically keep Congress and the President in separate political hands is to vote for John Kerry in November.
Returning to divided government would yield another benefit as well: Greater opportunity for reform, whether of the budget process, tort liability, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, or almost anything else. Niskanen has observed that the prospects for change "will be dependent on more bipartisan support than now seems likely in a united Republican government." He points out that tax reform occurred in 1986, and agriculture, telecommunications, and welfare reform a decade later, all under divided government.
The deficit can be cut in half if Congress "is willing to make tough choices," says President Bush. But GOP legislators are likely to make tough choices only if he is replaced by a Democrat. History teaches us that divided government equals fiscal probity, so vote Democratic for President if you want responsible budgeting in Washington.
2004-04-23 20:40 | User Profile
Why are the Neocon slime switching sides? From what I've heard and read, the Neokhans are upset at the way things are in Iraq, blaming the State Department (Colin Powell) and CIA for not immediately placing pro-ISRAEL, pro-NEOCON, corrupt "soft dictator" Ahmed Chalabi in power right after Baghdad fell last April. For that mistake, the neo cons are blaming the entire Iraqi quagmire on the Bush Administration. However it was the neocons who wanted this war since 1996 or earlier, so THEY are more guilty than hapless Jorge Dumbya for the Debacle in Iraq. The neo cons don't get a free pass and should be strung up with the rest of the lying, deceiving, violators of oath in the Bush Admin.
2004-04-24 19:43 | User Profile
Little Bill Kristol talks about war, force, violence, not backing down.
The guy must be 5 foot 1 inch tall. Don't expect him to actually do any of the fighting.
J