Category Archives: Neoconservatism

To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question

America, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism

“To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question” is my new weekly column, now up on RT (the reason for the late posting was explained here). Here is an excerpt:

“It’s okay to kill ’em, but it’s not okay to pee on them once they’re dead.

This sums up the piss-poor discussion over the LiveLeak clips of “four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.” According the New York Times, the videos, “posted on public video-sharing Web sites including YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday,” January 11.

The urinators “are members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.” They kicked off the wee odyssey in the northern part of Helmand Province.

Quick to distinguish themselves were the pro-pee pundits. For a ghastly moment, I was back in 2002, watching the anchorwomen of Fox News countdown to obliterating Iraq. How like watching bitches in heat that experience was!

The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley. The repartee of the two animated MTV characters, the products of Mike Judge’s genius (think “Idiocracy”), would go something like this:

Butthead: “Beavis, check this out. What’s better; to have a dude waste you or whiz on you, uh huh huh?” (Sound effects are here.)

Beavis: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the whiz, Butthead, gimme the whiz, yeah, yeah.” (More grunting.)

As the Daily Mail noted, the dead Afghans may have been civilians or insurgents, we simply do not know. Whichever is the case, they would have, I wager, welcomed the kind of options even Beavis and Butthead are capable of entertaining.

For the truth about the people we are pissing on and pissing off in Afghanistan is quite simple. America’s indisputably brave soldiers have been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population. These Pashtuns disdain the central government we desperately want them to obey. So it goes: We help local groups believed to be patriotic, but, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate they despise. …

The complete column is “To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question”. Read it on RT. Do “Like” it on Facebook and Retweet it to Twitter.

Andy Sullivan’s Struggle

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”

A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan“:

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.
Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

UPDATED: STRASSEL’S Non Sequitur

Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Military, Neoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Republicans, Ron Paul, Terrorism

KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL of the Wall Street Journal claimed, in “Why Ron Paul Can’t Win,” that “conservative Republicans” cannot accept Paul’s philosophy as it “fundamentally denies American exceptionalism and refuses to allow for decisive action to protect the U.S. homeland.”

Is STRASSEL equating American exceptionalism with the kind of non-defensive militarism America currently practices? It would appear so.

This writer’s position on said “exceptionalism”: “the United States, by virtue of its origins and ideals,” was unique. But most Americans know nothing of the ideas that animated their country’s founding. In fact, they are more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical liberal philosophy of the founders, and hence wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive state and the fulfillment of their own needs and desires through war and welfare.

Thus, I find myself in agreement with this one statement by Princeton’s Joyce Carol Oates:

“[T]ravel to any foreign country,” Oates wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2007, “and the consensus is: The American idea has become a cruel joke, a blustery and bellicose bodybuilder luridly bulked up on steroids…deranged and myopic, dangerous.”

[SNIP]

I thought Paul was strong on Jay Leno, but should probably not have cozied-up to the Left in the way he did. More on that later:

UPDATE: About Bachmann, Paul Said, “she doesn’t like Muslims, she hates them, she wants to go get ‘em.'” “In reference to Rick Santorum, Paul said he can’t stop talking about ‘gay people and Muslims.'” (ABC)

Leave aside whether these statements are true or not: Paul has taken a classic Chris-Matthews kind of ad hominem swipe against Michele Bachmann: she hates Muslims. Santorum hates gays and Muslims. Siding with the Left by adopting its arguments may be situationally advantageous, but it is wrong, and will backfire on a Republican candidate in the long run. This tactic, even if it was a not-so-funny joke, damages Ron Paul’s effectiveness from the vantage point of conservative libertarians who think that liberty cannot be reduced to the non-aggression axiom and has a cultural and civilizational dimension.

Paul is wrong to imply, reductively, that Islamic terrorism in general and September 11 in particular are the sole consequences of American foreign policy. Libertarians cannot persist in such unidirectional formulations. Our adventurous foreign policy is a necessary precondition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one.