Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Update III: Bush Bolsters Israel, Makes Policy Change Hard for Barack

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Economy, Individual Rights, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Neoconservatism, War

“President George W Bush called the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel an ‘act of terror’ and outlined his own conditions for a ceasefire in Gaza, in his weekly radio address to the American people.”

Listen to the president’s radio address. This is a very emphatic statement from George Bush. Such a forceful position in support for Israel makes it hard for the incoming president to deviate, or chart a new course.

Update I: The backdrop to the Israeli offensive:

A quarter of a million Israeli citizens have been living under incessant terror attacks from the Gaza Strip with thousands of missiles fired over the past eight years.

Israel left Gaza in 2005, giving Palestinians the chance to run their own lives. Despite this, more than 6300 rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel since then.

During the past year alone, more than 3000 rockets and mortars have been launched into Israel.

As US President-elect Obama stated during a visit to Sderot five months ago, “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.”

More…

Update II (Jan. 4): Regarding Bush and the comment by “gunjam” (may his gun never jam): Bush’s support for Israel’s self-defense need not be psychologized. The president’s violation of the negative rights of Iraqis; and his support for those of Israelis is not courageous, but craven and contradictory. As I observed in “Conservatives For Killing Terri“:

I can think of only two occasions on which I agreed with George Bush. Both involved the upholding of the people’s negative, or leave-me-alone, rights.

The first was his refusal to capitulate to the Kyoto-protocol crazies. Not surprisingly, some conservatives denounced this rare flicker of good judgment. And I’m not talking a “Crunchy Con” of Andrew Sullivan’s caliber—he does proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. No less a conservative than Joe Scarborough commiserated with actor Robert Redford over the president’s “blind spot on the environment.” (Ditto Bill O’Reilly.)

The other Bush initiative I endorsed was the attempt by Congress to uphold Terri Schiavo’s inalienable right to life—a decision very many conservatives now rue.

Update III: Did I hear Bush claim Hamas took over Gaza by violent coup? This is what the neoconservatives would like their acolytes to believe. This pie-in-the-Palestinian-sky helps neocons downplay the failure of their democratic evangelizing. Hamas, of course, won the 2006 elections fair and square. Even J. Carter conceded that much, if I’m not mistaken, as did other observers like him, who rushed to the PA to watch their Palestinian protégés practice democracy. The neocons will never admit that a democratic heart does not beat in every breast. In their cultural relativism they are no different from the lefties. Neocons are simply lefties who like war.

Updated: GOP, RIP?

Elections 2008, Ilana On Radio & TV, IMMIGRATION, Media, Neoconservatism, Republicans

The excerpt is from my latest WorldNetDaily column, “GOP, RIP?“:

“At bottom, what does David Brooks, the ‘Reformer,’ mean when he instructs ‘Conservatives … to appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters'”?

‘Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods,’ wrote H.L. Menken. ‘If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.’

‘Appealing to,’ or ‘reaching out,’ is political prattle for promising stuff. Republicans – ‘Reformed’ and Unreformed – have taken away from their defeat that they should be flogging more stolen goods in communities where such stuff is especially coveted.

These ‘Reformers’ want to ensure that the unreformed voter knows what’s on the menu next time around.

Time magazine would agree: “Thou Shalt not Covet” is so passé. (Or “so yesterday,” as the hip would say.)”

The complete column is here.

Update (Nov. 16): I will be chatting to Jerry Hughes of the Accent Radio Network, on his show, Conceived in Liberty. The topic: my column “GOP, RIP?” The time: 11:30 until 12:00 PM, Pacific.

Updated: Republicans’ Incoherent Mea Culpa

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Foreign Policy, IMMIGRATION, Neoconservatism, Republicans

An incoherent P.J. O’Rourke dithers on about why Republicans have betrayed conservatism. On the most important national questions-cum-calamities—perpetual immigration and war—he seems to think more of each was the way to go. That is if I understand the man’s bafflegab (perhaps I don’t).

If anything, led by deracinated neoconservatives, Republicans’ move to the left on immigration has been their downfall. And if O’Rourke’s own support for an ill-begotten war doesn’t yet excite disgust deep down, what hope is there for the rest? As I said, “GOP; RIP.” Here’s O’Rourke, if you can stomach him:

“Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)
To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?
We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it’s been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in such a place.
Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.
Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.
Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)”

Update (Nov. 11): John Zmirak of Taki’s Magazine concurs about the “senile” P.J.:

P.J. O’Rourke is now officially senile. Pour a stiff glass of bourbon before wading into this farrago of parrot-sh*t. The problem with conservatism, for P.J. as for Frumbag, is conservatives. They should learn to put up with forced desegregation and worthless public schools, gay marriage, abortion, colonization by hostile, nationalistic foreigners, and the use of the U.S. military to fight other country’s wars. In return they might, just might get… drumroll please: fiscal responsibility. Yeah, we’ve never spent a dime on all that federal equality micromanagement and foreign conquest, or all those uninsured unskilled laborers. That’s funded by pennies from heaven.

The same pious homilies are echoed by most of conservatism’s custodians—just enough “insight” to make themselves appear as though they’ve retained something of their faculties and have embarked on a quixotic quest to confront their excesses and errors; but not quite enough to show Republicans up for the rudderless sorts they are (for the most).

As always, Republicans are great at dimming and dumbing down debate.

‘Who Is Minding The Store, As We Party In St. Paul?’

Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

So asks Pat Buchanan in another thoughtful column, “Distant Drums At Sarah’s Party.” Here are excerpts:

“U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine – a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!” – but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Josef Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours?”