Category Archives: Neoconservatism

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?”

Neocons Resurrecting The Cold War

Bush, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

My colleague Vox Day has a perspicacious post about Russia’s assistance to the South Ossetian and neighboring Abkhazian separatists:

“This battle for Georgia – not South Ossetia – is a long time in coming. Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for it by altering the rules of the game in Serbia, in which it was made clear that a major power had the right to intervene on behalf of a breakaway republic if it cried “help, help, I’m being repressed” by the sovereign territory owner. The Russians rightly feel that they’re playing by our rules and they have every reason to believe they’re going to get away with it since there is zero sympathy for the anti-Russian US position in Europe. The European position, quite reasonably, is to shrug and assume that it’s just like Kosovo, except that they also don’t want to upset their Russian fuel supplies.

At this point, the Georgian attack on South Ossetia appears to have been a terrible miscalculation by the Georgians and their US and Israeli advisors, who have been trying to solidify control over the oil pipeline in recent months.”

Myself, I warned against recognizing Kosovo some time back: Here and here.

The neocons are getting hot for war. These warmed-over Trotskyites yearn to resuscitate the Cold War. Andrew Sullivan, once a neocon, really seems to have repented—turned away from neoconery. He dishes it out:

“Krauthammer this morning goes into raptures about the possibility of reliving the 1970s and 1980s:
The most crucial and unconditional measure, however, is this: Reaffirm support for the Saakashvili government and declare that its removal by the Russians would lead to recognition of a government-in-exile. This would instantly be understood as providing us the legal basis for supplying and supporting a Georgian resistance to any Russian-installed regime.

This is a 1980s Afghanistan gambit, a de facto return to the Cold War, even though Russia is not a global expansionist power any more, and even though it is no longer communist. No thought given, apparently, to the chance that this could backfire on a power now occupying two countries rather closer to Russia than Georgia is to the US. Oh, well. They’ll figure that out later. There’s Russians to fight! One thing that baffles me: why does the US need a legal basis for anything in Krauthammer’s view?”

All that from a man who used to be a neocon of the deepest dye. Andrew may yet redeem himself.

Updated: Beam Scotty (McClellan) Up

Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, War

You mean there still is no consensus about the unconstitutional, unjust war an American government waged? That’s right; the “nation” is still litigating the invasion of Iraq. What’s more, the stakeholders are circling the wagons.

Here is something of the smorgasbord of McClellan coverage; it’s some of what you should take away from the publication of a stale, tell-all by a former low-level Bush administration functionary. Admonitions are in order for most members of the media who were right by Scotty’s side, whooping it up for war crimes. For or against Scott, send in some of the reviews you like (but take your pro-war crimes comments elsewhere):

• “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?”—Richard A. Clarke

• “It would have been nice if he had told us some of this at the time, back when it was his job to keep the public informed.”—Karen Tumulty, Time magazine [Not so fast Ms. Tumulty; it was YOUR job too to apprise the public.]

• “The memoir strikes me as the standard stuff: ‘I was an insider to a corrupt group but the head of the group and I weren’t corrupt; we were misled.’”—liberal blog called American Street

• “Bush displayed a ‘lack of inquisitiveness’; the administration operated in a ‘permanent campaign mode’; the Iraq war ‘was not necessary’–other than that McClellan’s chosen to reveal them. But is that even really that surprising?” And: “the book displays a calculating mind that was never much in evidence in the White House press room.”—Jason Zengerle, The New Republic

Update (June 3): After watching Scott McClellan handle the raging bull, Bill O’Reilly, I’ve changed my opinion. This young man was strong, courageous and filled with a certain conviction. He did well against the man who acted as an accomplice to the administration, and who sold the war to those who’d have to go out and fight it. This was Bush’s war, Blair’s war, Podhoretz’s war, and Billo’s war. Billo showed his discomfort by flaring his nostrils and pursing his lips. McClellan, who was calm and comfortable, got to the man.

McClellan’s ability to admit over and over again that he had been completely wrong in his judgment and ethics served as a good contrast to Billo, who was prepared to concede nothing of the kind.

Granted, McClellan is not opposing the war on the most solid of grounds: Implicit in the case he makes is that if Iraq had WMD—irrespective of it not threatening the US or having any ties to al-Qaida—the US would have had a case for war. McClellan implies that we had a right to enforce UN resolutions, be a global governor. (Suddenly the US is an arm of the UN). We don’t.

Still, I will buy McClellan’s role as a bellwether of sorts—another insider sounding a warning—when the evidence against this corrupt administration results in impeachments, disgrace, and loss of face. There are no signs of that so far.