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The Anti-Conservatives

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Walter Yannis [OP]

2005-02-26 07:55 | User Profile

February 28, 2005 Issue [URL=http://amconmag.com/2005_02_28/buchanan.html]The American Conservative[/URL]

The Anti-Conservatives

Who convinced the president that our democracy depends on a worldwide crusade?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

That George W. Bush would seek to embed the Iraq War in the higher cause of global democracy was to be expected. That is the way of wartime presidents.

By late 1863, Lincoln’s war to crush Southern secession was about whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall ... perish from the earth.” By 1917, the European war whose causes Wilson professed not to understand in 1916 had become “the war to end all wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy.”

Leaders alchemize wars begun over lesser interests into epochal struggles for universal principles because only thus can they justify demands for greater sacrifices in blood and treasure. But Bush has gone Wilson one better. He is not only going to make the world safe for democracy, he is going to make the world democratic. Where Lincoln abolished slavery in the South, Bush is going to abolish tyranny from the earth: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

A conservative knows not whether to laugh or weep, for Mr. Bush has just asserted a right to interfere in the internal affairs of every nation on earth. Why? Because the “survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” But this is utterly ahistorical. The world has always been afflicted with despots. Yet America has always been free. And we have remained free by following the counsel of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams and staying out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars.

Who is feeding the president this interventionist nonsense?

The president now plans to hector and badger foreign leaders on the progress each is making toward attaining U.S. standards of democracy. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and nation—the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.” This is a formula for “Bring-it-on!” collisions with every autocratic regime on earth, including virtually every African and Arab ruler, all the “outposts of tyranny” named by Secretary Rice, most of the nations of Central Asia, China, and Russia. This is a prescription for endless war. Yet as Madison warned, “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Who and what converted a president who came to office with no knowledge of the world to the idea that only a global crusade for democracy could keep us secure? Answer: 9/11—and the neoconservatives.

In his inaugural address, Mr. Bush calls 9/11 the day “when freedom came under attack.” This is sophomoric. Osama did not send fanatics to ram planes into the World Trade Center because he hates the Bill of Rights. He sent the terrorists here because he hates our presence and policies in the Middle East. He did it for the same reason FLN rebels blew up cafes in Paris and Hamas suicide bombers blow up pizza parlors in Jerusalem.

From the Battle of Algiers to the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, from the expulsion of the Red Army by the mujahideen of Afghanistan to the expulsion of Israel from Lebanon by Hezbollah, guerrilla war and terror tactics have been the means Muslims have used to expel armies they could not defeat in conventional war.

The 9/11 killers were over here because we are over there. We were not attacked because of who we are but because of what we do. It is not our principles they hate. It is our policies. U.S. intervention in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 terror. Bush believes it is the cure. Has he learned nothing from Iraq?

In 2003, we invaded a nation that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us to disarm it of weapons it did not have. Now, after plunging $200 billion and the lives of 1,400 of our best and bravest into this war and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, we have reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world and, according to officials in our own government, have created a new nesting place and training ground for terrorists to replace the one we lately eradicated in Afghanistan.

Among those who have converted President Bush to the notion that without Arab democracy there can be no Mideast peace is Natan Sharansky, and much of what the famed Soviet dissident writes is undeniably true. Even inside the darkest despotism, people yearn for freedom. They hate tyranny and love liberty. They wish to live in lands that allow them to choose their own leaders. And as democratic rulers must return to the people for renewal of their mandates in free elections, they are more likely to seek the peace and prosperity their people desire. Thus, only democracy can pave the way to true peace and security. This is the message of Sharansky’s Case for Democracy, which the president has embraced and encouraged all to read.

But what is often true is not always true, and U.S. foreign policy, which is to protect U.S. vital interests and the peace and freedom of Americans, cannot be rooted in the idealism of an ex-Soviet dissident or the ideology of neoconservatives who promised us a “cakewalk” in Iraq and assured us we would be welcomed with flowers. Sharansky notwithstanding, democracy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of America’s peace and security, nor even of Israel’s.

In 1967, David Ben-Gurion told Richard Nixon and this writer he hoped Nasser would survive Egypt’s humiliation in the Six-Day War because only Nasser had the prestige to lead the Arabs to accept peace with Israel. Sadat was no democrat when Israel gave him back the Sinai and signed a peace. Arafat was no democrat when Rabin and Peres agreed to the Oslo Accords and shared a Nobel Prize with him. Assad was no democrat when Israel negotiated a truce with him on the Golan Heights. That truce has held. Nor was Khadafi a democrat when Bush agreed to lift sanctions imposed on Libya for the massacre of Pan Am 103 if Khadafi would surrender his weapons of mass destruction. Khadafi did, and Bush rightly claims this as a diplomatic success of his first term.

While it is true that the dictatorships of Franco, Pinochet, and Marcos gave way to democracies, that was not true of Batista, Somoza, or the Shah. When Carter undermined the Peacock Throne, we got the Ayatollah.

Urging Bush not to press Israel into making peace with the Palestinians until Palestine embraces democracy is a clever way to postpone peace indefinitely and let Israel expand its settlements and consolidate its hold over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That may be in Israel’s interest. But it is not in America’s interest. Sharansky’s idealism just happens to coincide with Sharon’s agenda. Can President Bush not see this?

America has old friendships and important interests in the Middle East that cannot await the dawn of democracy in the 22 Arab states where it currently does not exist. We cannot make the best the enemy of the good. And if democracy means rule by the people, how enthusiastic should we be about its introduction into the Middle East? In 1991, Algerians were given a democratic vote—and elected an Islamist regime. The army intervened, igniting a civil war that left 100,000 dead. President Bush might ask his father why he did not speak up for Algerian democracy then.

Unlike Eastern Europe, where communism was imposed on Christian countries with traditions of self-rule, democracy never took root in the Arab lands of the caliphate. Thus King Farouk’s ouster gave us Nasser. King Idris’s ouster gave us Khadafi. And King Feisal’s ouster gave us Saddam Hussein. How certain are we that if the kings of Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia fall, democracies will arise?

Given that the neocons were wrong on every count about Iraq, does Bush truly wish to gamble the Middle East on their confident predictions that, once the Arab monarchies fall, Western democracy will flourish among people who seem to revile Bush and revere Osama bin Laden?

After the shocked reaction in many quarters to the president’s inaugural address, the White House, George H.W. Bush, and later the president himself hastened to explain that there was nothing new or radical in the speech. Perhaps a sense of reality has already begun to manifest itself.

We are simply not going to stop buying Saudi oil or cut off our $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt or sever relations with Musharraf or sanction a China that could sink the dollar because these regimes refuse to make the reforms Bush demands. It is not going to happen. President Bush will either wind up eating his overblown rhetoric or following it over the cliff and taking us with him.

America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” said John Quincy Adams, “She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Under the tutelage of Jacobins who call themselves idealists, Bush has repudiated this wise core doctrine of U.S. foreign policy to embrace Wilsonian interventionism in the internal affairs of every autocratic regime on earth. We are going to democratize the world and abolish tyranny.

Giddy with excitement, the neocons are falling all over one another to hail the president. They are not conservatives at all. They are anti-conservatives, and their crusade for democracy will end as did Wilson’s, in disillusionment for the president and tragedy for this country.

February 28, 2005 Issue

il ragno

2005-02-26 09:44 | User Profile

I'm with AY on this one. Pat keeps banging that same useless drum: that Bush is a good guy, albeit naive, who is getting bad advice.

He keeps appealing to better angels that simply aren't there.

Bush was a drunken cokehead frat-boy born into wealth and power who was handed every 'opportunity' (that he then proceeded to screw up) on a silver platter. I see no core of decency, let alone wisdom, [I]in [/I] him. [I]Lots[/I] of unprincipled scumbags catch on to the hiding-behind-Jesus scam .

And Pat is beginning to sound like a fool crabbing about neos who duck war themselves only to impose it on everyone else - considering that description fits Bush and Cheney to a [I]tee[/I].

Let's say that Pat's judgment of Dubya is 100% correct. That makes the most dangerous man on the planet an easily-duped halfwit with good intentions [I]at best[/I]. Which means he's even [B]more[/B] unfit for the office than if he were a cowardly, opportunistic warmonger licking his lips at splitting the world three ways between the oil lobby, the multinationals and the Likudniks.

Either way, Pat, live up to your oft-stated principles. If traditional conservatism is built on personal accountability and responsibility, cobbling up theories that let Bush off with a stern lecture is the 21st-century geopolitical edition of a judge slapping baby-faced teenage killers on the wrists because, after all, they're only [I]crazy mixed-up kids[/I].

Walter Yannis

2005-02-26 09:55 | User Profile

[QUOTE=il ragno]Let's say that Pat's judgment of Dubya is 100% correct. That makes the most dangerous man on the planet an easily-duped halfwit with good intentions [I]at best[/I]. Which means he's even [B]more[/B] unfit for the office than if he were a cowardly, opportunistic warmonger licking his lips at splitting the world three ways between the oil lobby, the multinationals and the Likudniks.

Either way, Pat, live up to your oft-stated principles. If traditional conservatism is built on personal accountability and responsibility, cobbling up theories that let Bush off with a stern lecture is the 21st-century geopolitical edition of a judge slapping baby-faced teenage killers on the wrists because, after all, they're only [I]crazy mixed-up kids[/I].[/QUOTE]

It's hard to argue with that.

I don't know what's up with PJB.

I suspect that the problem is that he's just not a racist, no matter how much I'd love to believe to the contrary. I think that PJB, like Reagan, sincerely believes all that liberal twaddle about judging a man by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. How else can one explain his choice for VP, or his abortive alliance with Lenora Fulani?

But racism is the glue that holds conservatism together. How can he fail to see that conservatism lost the moment it caved on the race issue, thus ceding the moral high ground to the enemies of our civilization?

If indeed PJB rejects the reality of race, then he's 90% of the way to neoconservatism anyway. But that doesn't explain the drubbing he gets (and earned, I should add in fairness) in the neocon press.

PJB remains a mystery to me.

AntiYuppie

2005-02-26 20:51 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]It's hard to argue with that.

I don't know what's up with PJB.

I suspect that the problem is that he's just not a racist, no matter how much I'd love to believe to the contrary. I think that PJB, like Reagan, sincerely believes all that liberal twaddle about judging a man by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin. How else can one explain his choice for VP, or his abortive alliance with Lenora Fulani?

But racism is the glue that holds conservatism together. How can he fail to see that conservatism lost the moment it caved on the race issue, thus ceding the moral high ground to the enemies of our civilization?

If indeed PJB rejects the reality of race, then he's 90% of the way to neoconservatism anyway. But that doesn't explain the drubbing he gets (and earned, I should add in fairness) in the neocon press.

PJB remains a mystery to me.[/QUOTE] Buchanan is not a racialist. Those who think he is are simply projecting their best hopes by accepting the neocon characterization of him. At first I thought that the choice of Foster was also a cynical ploy designed to prove his pc credentials, but the more I thought about it the more I thought the likely explanation is that PJB simply doesn't hold racial views.

In this regard he is not atypical of paleoconservatives in general. Jared Taylor took Thomas Fleming to task (correctly) for opposing racial separation in America while championing a naive neo-Confederatism. Fleming must genuinely believe that a white man in Missouri has more in common with a St. Louis negro than with another white man across the river in Illinois. Even Joseph Sobran is obviously not a racialist - he even criticized Buchanan's opposition to mestizo immigration. The only major name in paleoconservative circles who had strong racial views and genuinely wanted to work with racialists was the late Dr. Francis. I was attracted to "paleoconservatism" because I had thought that Francis was representative of that worldview, in fact he was the exception rather than the rule.

However, none of this addresses the real issue at hand - why does Buchanan hesitate to do anything besides mildly chide Bush. This has nothing to do with racialism, there is no taboo about attacking Bush in the mass media, not yet at least.

It may be that Bush is indeed an empty vessel filled with whatever pap he's being fed, but that doesn't absolve other members of his circle: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, etc, all of whom are obviously not idiots. These people weren't "manipulated" by Kristol and Wolfowitz, they knew full well what Kristol's post 9/11 memo and Wolfowitz's "man in Havana" status are all about and approve of it whole-heartedly. It is also likely that given whatever feeble grasp of the world around him Bush has, he probably approves of what's going on also, and as President, bears the ultimate responsibility.

As for the counterargument (I think Tex and mwd voiced this opinion) that Bush is unassailable because the people Buchanan is trying to reach identify closely with him, then my contention is that any talk about neocons will fall on barren soil with such people. If somebody is either corrupt or naive enough to identify strongly with Bush and his policies, there is no talking sense to such a person. As I remarked before, the only people who might be receptive to Buchanan's anti-neocon message are also staunchly anti-Bush. Attacking the first while praising the second only repels those people who Pat could be reaching.

What's really going on here, I think, is that PJB has residual loyalty towards the Republican party after serving it for so many years. This is what leads him to tone down his attacks on the Bush administration, and it was what caused him to run such an incompetent 2000 third party campaign. The lesson to be learned is that loyalty to organizations, parties, or even individual people is a mistake. One should only remain loyal to ideas and principles. Otherwise, you'll be stuck writing columns about how a slow-witted and corrupt President is a "good man."

Walter Yannis

2005-02-27 10:31 | User Profile

[QUOTE][AntiYuppie]As for the counterargument (I think Tex and mwd voiced this opinion) that Bush is unassailable because the people Buchanan is trying to reach identify closely with him, then my contention is that any talk about neocons will fall on barren soil with such people. If somebody is either corrupt or naive enough to identify strongly with Bush and his policies, there is no talking sense to such a person. As I remarked before, the only people who might be receptive to Buchanan's anti-neocon message are also staunchly anti-Bush. Attacking the first while praising the second only repels those people who Pat could be reaching.[/QUOTE]

I agree with that. I suspect that we're closer to many on the left than we are to Freepers.

Leftist thinkers like [URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1887208046/qid=1109497659/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/102-8241630-8713752?v=glance&s=books&n=507846]David Korten [/URL] suggest an "organic" approach to social organization - meaning living deliberately and with an abiding respect for our own evolved natures. This includes ridding ourselves of ideology and sticking to things that work, including the free markets (a position Korten spent much of his adult life approaching) and devolved power structures. I agree with him on that much. But for whatever reason, Korten can't seem to "get" that living in accordance with our evolved natures implies racial and ethnic group integrity. He seems to be groping toward that, though. There are some interesting passages in his books about what a devolved world based on green technologies would look like. (But that said Korten is very much a New Ager and he seems wedded to silly notions of human equality).

I have to say, however, that my journey from the Reaganite/libertarian right to the Far Catholic Right (Chesteron/Belloc) brought me to a place that seems pretty close to the spot Korten landed on his journey from the neo-Marxist left, at least in terms of social organization.

[QUOTE]What's really going on here, I think, is that PJB has residual loyalty towards the Republican party after serving it for so many years. This is what leads him to tone down his attacks on the Bush administration, and it was what caused him to run such an incompetent 2000 third party campaign. The lesson to be learned is that loyalty to organizations, parties, or even individual people is a mistake. One should only remain loyal to ideas and principles. Otherwise, you'll be stuck writing columns about how a slow-witted and corrupt President is a "good man."[/QUOTE]

Well, I agree with that, but I wonder if it goes far enough. I don't know if what we're talking about here is "residual" loyalty. I suspect, although cannot prove, that PJB remains very much a man of the RNC. I'll risk the ire of some here by suggesting that PJB is in fact an agent provocateur, working for the RNC. Viewed objectively, PJB did more than anybody else to liquidate the threat of the Reform Party of Ross Perot (he killed the party) as well as to prevent a white opposition from forming around guys like David Duke.

I'm not saying PJB is guilty of that, but I am saying there's enough grounds for suspicion that we should treat PJB with heightened caution. At the very least, I think we all have to agree that it's a possibility we can't logically exclude.

Faust

2005-02-27 19:18 | User Profile

AntiYuppie,

Buchanan and Sobran are both Catholics who claim that John Paul II, a degenerate leftist who was one of the leaders of the Vatican II “reforms” is a great guardian of faith, morals, and traditions of the Roman Church. Sadly I fear they believe it too. May be Buchanan views Jorge el Bush II in the same way in his role as “leader” of America.

Very true. [QUOTE]What's really going on here, I think, is that PJB has residual loyalty towards the Republican party after serving it for so many years. This is what leads him to tone down his attacks on the Bush administration, and it was what caused him to run such an incompetent 2000 third party campaign. The lesson to be learned is that loyalty to organizations, parties, or even individual people is a mistake. One should only remain loyal to ideas and principles. Otherwise, you'll be stuck writing columns about how a slow-witted and corrupt President is a "good man."[/QUOTE]

il ragno is very Right. [QUOTE]I'm with AY on this one. Pat keeps banging that same useless drum: that Bush is a good guy, albeit naive, who is getting bad advice. He keeps appealing to better angels that simply aren't there. Bush was a drunken cokehead frat-boy born into wealth and power who was handed every 'opportunity' (that he then proceeded to screw up) on a silver platter. I see no core of decency, let alone wisdom, in him. Lots of unprincipled scumbags catch on to the hiding-behind-Jesus scam .[/QUOTE]