printMy colleague Vox Day penned an important column about foreign policy, last week. Sadly, his “Better Late Than Never” WND piece will be ignored by the self-satisfied conservative Idiocracy, which has an allergy to truth and reason.
“The so-called ‘isolationist’ Right had it right all along. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Taliban ever presented one-tenth the danger to Americans that criminal immigrants, legal and illegal, pose to them. And yet the conservative media has been willing to spend more than $1 trillion on replacing a secular socialist government with a radical Shiite one and expelling a Taliban government in favor of one that is merely Taliban-influenced while nonsensically continuing to call for more immigration.
“But the fact is that there is absolutely no past or present justification for the invasions of either Afghanistan or Iraq when considered from the perspective of the American national interest. One could make a much more rational national-security case for declaring war against Mexico, Canada or even Honduras. And there is absolutely no justification for the continued military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq nine and seven years on.”
Vox expresses regret for his initial support for the war and points out the signal significance of Joseph Farah’s recent renunciation of the current errant foreign policy.
The following words I especially appreciated:
Only a very few commentators, such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo and WorldNetDaily’s own Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, can truly say that they were opposed from the start to the expensive, unconstitutional and ultimately useless abuses of the American military that have been inflicted upon it by Republican and Democratic commanders in chief over the last nine years.
It takes a man …
Paradigm shifts are typically unsettling and painful. I was one of those conservatives who enthusiastically supported both moves into Afghanistan and then into Iraq, all the time thinking it was all part and parcel of defending kith and kin.
How could I have been so blind?
If we were serious, really serious about defending ourselves from invasion, whether from Islam or the Third World, our borders would be shut down, illegals deported. But what backbone does a mere propositional nation have? What do we really believe in beyond abstractions leading to some supposed utopia?
Yes, hats off to you, Miss Ilana, Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Raimondo, et al. who were consistent from the beginning. But Brothers Day and Farah have my respect for publicly admitting they were wrong. May their tribe increase!
Well, the good news is that you (and myself and a few others) were correct back in 2002. The other good news is that others are coming to recognize that.
The BAD NEWS is that many of the neocon types or leftish-hawks will either (a) invent a pseudo-history as has been done with Vietnam and 1938 “Munich” or (b) come up with some measly mouthed nuance (like John Kerry) how their pro-war stance would not have been the disaster that Bush’s was. And the irony is no matter how many times these politicians and “pundits” get it wrong, they will be treated as sages (by or be part of) the “mainstream media”. Get it right – and you are an extremist quack. Get it wrong – you are a New York Times columnist!
I think most people welcomed action against Afghanistan, but not in the way it turned out. Most folks envisioned us going in and killing Al Qaeda by bombing and overrunning their camps, you know the famous ones with the monkey bars. I don’t think we expected, nor desired, to take over that nation and attempt to administer it like a US territory.
I like his last question:
I hope to see that Glenn Beck and Joseph Farah will stand by their recently realized imperial skepticism when Sarah Palin or whatever other Republican figure starts beating the war drum.
Yes, yes I was for it before I was against it. Mercer has brought me around to her way of thinking, on this particular subject. However, I was never personally soft on immigration and never will be. Also I will never take cheap shots at the troops like many participants of this blog. As I’ve said many times, because I have no answer of my own, “What do we do now”?