Category Archives: Neoconservatism

UPDATED: Bravo Britain (Neocons For Total War)

Barack Obama, Britain, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

BBC News fails to lead its Internet page with the magnificent news that Parliament, for once, has executed the will of the people, and that the UK will be staying out of Syria.

Instead, the left-liberal interventionist at BBC News (people of Samantha Power’s ilk) have buried the item in an article about “I, Obama” (America’s imperial president), and his administration’s various ahistoric, idiotic pronouncements.

The lead in question reads: “US led by ‘best interests’ on Syria.”

BBC News makes only veiled allusions to the “unexpected outcome in the parliament,” to “British MPs [ruling] out London’s involvement in any US-led strikes against Syria,” and to “British members of [parliament’s rejection] of the principle of military action against Damascus in a 285-272 vote.”

UPDATE (8/30): TOTAL WAR.

“The BBC footage is grisly; the British media have been far more invested in the Syrian civil war than their U.S. colleagues,” confirms Mark Steyn.

This week, David Cameron recalled Parliament from its summer recess to permit the people’s representatives to express their support for the impending attack. Instead, for the first time since the British defeat at Yorktown in 1782, the House of Commons voted to deny Her Majesty’s Government the use of force. Under the Obama “reset,” even the Coalition of the Willing is unwilling. “It’s clear to me that the British Parliament and the British people do not wish to see military action,” said the prime minister. So the Brits are out, and, if he goes at all, Obama will be waging war without even Austin Powers’s Union Jack fig leaf.

Steyn here advances the staid neoconservative tack (in dazzling style, as always). When neocons lose an argument for war, they just regroup and renew their efforts.

“What the British people are sick of, quite reasonably enough,” claims Steyn, “is ineffectual warmongering.”

Yeah, give us total, all-out war and we’ll march in goose step with Chuck Krauthammer.

Actually, re-reading “An Accidental War,” I can’t quite tell what Steyn advocates (all in dazzling style, of course).

UPDATE II: So Said Ban Ki- Moon (Saving Presidential Face)

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, UN, War

Secretary of State John Kerry has “watched the videos — the videos that anybody can watch in the social media,” and based on “the videos,” he will likely invade Syria. Kerry admitted, in his address today, that his sources are not quite sure who’s doing what to whom in Syria, but meddle he and Obama must.

Ban Ki- moon said last week, the U.N. investigation will not determine who used these chemical weapons, only whether such weapons were used, a judgement that is already clear to the world.

The US government has no constitutional authority to police the world. The castrates in Congress ought to have a say, for what that’s worth, in the decisions of the imperial president. And as Patrick J. Buchanan put it,:

… who deputized the United States to walk the streets of the world pistol-whipping bad actors? Where does our imperial president come off drawing “red lines” and ordering nations not to cross them?

Neither the Security Council nor Congress nor NATO nor the Arab League has authorized war on Syria.

Who made Barack Obama the Wyatt Earp of the Global Village?

Moreover, where is the evidence that WMDs were used and that it had to be Assad who ordered them? Such an attack makes no sense.

Firing a few shells of gas at Syrian civilians was not going to advance Assad’s cause but, rather, was certain to bring universal condemnation on his regime and deal cards to the War Party, which wants a U.S. war on Syria as the back door to war on Iran.

Why did the United States so swiftly dismiss Assad’s offer to have U.N. inspectors – already in Damascus investigating old charges he or the rebels used poison gas – go to the site of the latest incident?

Do we not want to know the truth?

Are we fearful the facts may turn out, as did the facts on the ground in Iraq, to contradict our latest claims about WMDs? Are we afraid that it was rebel elements or rogue Syrian soldiers who fired the gas shells to stampede us into fighting this war?

UPDATE (B/27): Saving Presidential Face. The ponce-in-chief drew a red line in the sand; he ran his mouth off, as an anti-interventionist on CNN suggested. So now the US must make even more of a mess of Syria, if that’s possible, so as to save presidential face.

UPDATE II: “In an amazing and unsettling coincidence,” quips my former colleague Vox Day, “it seems the recent massacre in Syria, which we are supposed to believe was committed by the Assad regime just as it had taken control of the civil war …” (The rest of the sentence is not clear to me.)

What’s interesting is that Assad might have been winning, which means a heavy-handed calm might have been restored to that country soon.

UPDATED: Will Mark Levin Ever Diss Militarism and Majoritarianism (As Facets of Statism)?

Constitution, Democracy, Federalism, Founding Fathers, libertarianism, Liberty, Military, Neoconservatism, States' Rights

Mark Levin is right about the need to repeal the 17th Amendment. Libertarians have long since argued in favor of senators once again being elected by the respective state legislatures, as was the original intent of the Framers.

However, about eight minutes into Mr. Levin’s segment with Sean Hannity, I heard the radio host emphasize only the idea of term limits vis-a-vis the Senate, when he should have also been dissing the idea of democracy. Were not America’s constitution makers trying to put in place a scheme that would forestall unfettered democracy?

Was this not the purpose of an upper House elected by state legislatures, and not by the people at large as the 17th Amendment decreed?

I imagine there is no place for curbing militarism in the grand scheme of Mr. Levin’s new book.

Neoconservatives do not consider the military-industrial-complex a branch of Leviathan. However, militarism and majoritarianism are facets of statism.

UPDATE: From “Independence And The Declaration of Secession”:

“While Mark Levin, the radio man lauded by his Republican adherents as “The Great One,” has denounced the secessionists among us (check), McClellan (a real scholar) seconded the Declaration’s secessionist impetus. …”

Beware The Country Of ‘Absurdistan’

Constitution, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, Liberty, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Reason, Republicans, States' Rights, War

My good friend professor Thomas DiLorenzo is on fire today, at LRC.Com, decrying the actions of the “Biggest Bully in the World.” The strictly anti-bullying US government—its overweening, unconstitutional reach extends to educating kids about bullying, or, as Tom puts it, “putting YOUR money where THEIR mouths are by funding all kinds of anti-bullying programs in schools”—is intercepting airplanes not its own, and bullying sovereign governments, all in an attempt to corner a heroic, powerless young man called Edward Snowden.

Then, “National Neocon Review” has been working overtime to justify the crimes of mass murderer Abe Lincoln. But Tom DiLorenzo will have none of it. He smacks that lot down good and proper with foolproof arguments from natural law and logic:

… Studying and writing about Lincoln and the “Civil War” is not, as National Neocon Review implies, the same as attending a football game where one roots for one team or the other. It is about discovering the truth. Criticizing Lincoln does not make one a supporter of the Confederate government any more than criticizing FDR makes one a supporter of the Nazi government. We are supposed to believe that because the Confederate government suspended habeas corpus it is simply irrelevant that the Lincoln regime was a constitutional nightmare. We are supposed to believe the cartoonish Harry Jaffa, says National Neocon Review, when he says that Lincoln never did a single thing that was unconstitutional, contrary to reality and the writings of several generations of scholars who preceded Jaffa. This is reminiscent of the canned response to Lincoln critics by the last generation of Lincoln cultists: Lincoln wasn’t as bad as Hitler or Stalin, they frequently pointed out. So shut up.

MORE.