"I regret that I have but one life to give for political incorrectness ..."
2005-06-24
Pseudo-conservatives
To me, the real conservatives are what many people call “paleoconservatives.” What people now often call “conservative” strikes me as being more accurately called “pseudo-conservative.” Most of the neocons I would consider as pseudo-cons. Here are some other examples of the pseudo-con class.
In America, the ideology of libertarianism is itself a scandal. It involves not only a retreat from Obamaism but a retreat from the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged, along with a withdrawal from American global commitments.
[What a joke of a columnist!
Do “America’s most basic social commitments” call for spending 17 percent of the GDP on “health care”? I don’t think so. That amount can and should be pared back to the 1950s level of five percent of the GDP. Sure, some old folks would have to forgo their joint replacements, and no doubt would not live thirty or more years after their retirement, as many view as their, literally, entitlement. Fewer grandmas would be out on the dance floor dancing on their seventieth wedding anniversary. Perhaps they would do as grandparents traditionally did, relinquish the center stage to their daughters and grand-daughters. Perhaps they would achieve contentment and fulfillment from seeing how well their offspring were doing. Perhaps they would not be so self-centered. In any case, that pre-Great Society level of spending on the elderly would hardly qualify in a sane world as the “a retreat from the most basic level of social commitment.” Rather, it would be viewed as a sane move to batten down the hatches of the ship of state so that it could withstand the fiscal storms ahead.
Gerson, in that sentence, shows indelibly what he truly is: a Great Society liberal. To bill himself as a conservative, and for the media to so bill him, is clearly a case of (intellectual) fraud.
As to “America’s global commitments,” Gerson in past columns has shown himself to be a full supporter of the insane passion of the “elite” to bankrupt America on foolish and unnecessary commitments abroad, from the whole range of involvement in the Greater Middle East to such foolishness pushed by the white trash that forms the Zionist occupation government as a commitment to, of all places, the country of Georgia in the Caucasus region. What on earth does America care who rules South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Why do the media/political elite first demand, and then give, an American commitment on that subject?]
[1]
The process whereby the neoconservatives
were able to hijack the Republican Party’s foreign policy
has been dissected and analyzed frequently over the past two years.
Perhaps more disturbing in the long term, however, is their success at hijacking the label “conservative.”
When broadcast journalists Brian Williams and Katie Couric
describe someone as a conservative Republican,
they are frequently actually referring to a neoconservative.
When a Sunday morning talk show
has a “conservative” on a panel to provide “balance,”
he is more often than not a neoconservative.
This access to the media as the purported standard-bearers of conservatism
has proven useful,
as it enables the neocons to continue to have a major voice on policy in spite of being wrong on every major issue.[!]
It also empowers them to constantly spin and refine their story,
exonerating themselves while fear-mongering that
there are new dangers that have to be dealt with, more dragons to slay.
[2]
Most Republicans, like most voters,
prefer not to think very much about what the “conservative” label means. Conservatism means
supporting traditional ways of doing things domestically,
i.e., not embracing radical change,
and a strong defense policy overseas.
Apart from that,
there is not a great deal of refinement in the public’s view of conservatism.
For many, a desirable defense and security policy
is precisely what the neocons have created,
a vengeful lashing out at the rest of the
brown-skinned, non-Christian, ostensibly terrorism-fostering world
using the maximum military force to complete the job.
In line with that simplistic worldview,
many self-described conservatives
continue to defend President George W. Bush and his neocon foreign policy
only because
they believe it important to support a Republican president
come hell or high water,
not because they have considered the issues
or the ups and downs of the policies that are being pursued.
They take it on faith that Iran is bad and will have to be dealt with firmly, because, after all,
that is what they are constantly seeing and hearing on television
and reading in the newspapers,
mostly coming from the same neocons who brought us Iraq.
[3]
But there is no free ride, politically speaking,
and bad policies eventually result in a price paid at the voting box.
As the Iraq war is now disapproved of by more than two-thirds of Americans
and further involvement in Iran is equally unpopular,
Republicans and conservatives will have to rethink ... their foreign policy
if they ever hope to regain majority party status.
In so doing, they should return to the conservative principles
that were delineated by the Founding Fathers,
Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan
prior to the hijacking of the conservative label under George W. Bush.
[4]
The first principle for conservatives is that war is a “last option” to be employed when all else fails
and there is a direct and imminent danger to the United States.
U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen
are a precious commodity not be wasted in pointless wars,
and our armed services are
not an appropriate instrument for rebuilding or reforming other nations. Iran’s form of government is none of our business,
and Tehran does not currently pose a level of threat to the American people
that would justify military action.
Ronald Reagan put it best:
“The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise:
the United States does not start fights.
We will never be an aggressor.”
Barry Goldwater recommended that U.S. foreign policy
“make it clear to all nations of this world that
we have no desire to expand our territory
or to impose our type of government
or our way of life on any other people.”
Prior to George Bush,
Republicans and conservatives have traditionally been reluctant warriors.
In the last century, the
First World War,
Second World War,
Korea, and
the escalation in Vietnam
all took place under Democratic administrations
with considerable dissent from Republicans.
[In fact, a standard, if much-hated by the Democrats, Republican line was that
Republicans were better at keeping the United States out of wars.]
[5]
In line with a reluctance to go to war,
conservatives have always believed that the first line of defense is diplomacy.
Diplomacy supports the national interest
without unleashing the unintended consequences that arise from warfare.
As Russell Kirk put it,
“A sound conservative foreign policy in the age which is dawning
should be neither ‘interventionist’ nor ‘isolationist’;
it should be prudent.”
Diplomacy between the United States and Iran has not really been tried
but is being dismissed by both the Bush administration and presidential candidate John McCain as naïve.
It is time to do the proper and prudent conservative thing,
which means sitting down and talking to Iran,
with no preconditions and with all issues on the table.
[6]
Conservatives also recognize that
while the first victim in war is certainly truth in the media,
the second victim is invariably civil liberties and the Constitution.
War means
armies, police, taxes, big government, and restriction of personal freedoms.
It erodes fundamental rights and nearly always means
intrusion into the private lives of citizens
through laws that remain in place even after the foreign threat has disappeared.
As James Madison wrote,
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. ...
Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded
because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 put it even more starkly,
calling on Americans to avoid
“the necessity of those overgrown military establishments
which, under any form of government,
are inauspicious to liberty,
and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
If Iraq, Afghanistan, and the largely fictional global war on terrorism
produced
the PATRIOT Act,
the Military Commissions Act,
the loss of FISA court controls, and
the unitary executive concept,
it is useful to consider what a more serious war with Iran might bring.
The United States does not need to dismantle more of the Constitution
to fight yet another war of choice,
because doing so will not make us any safer, only less free.
[7]
Fiscal responsibility,
a strong dollar, and
maintaining the economic well-being of the citizens
are also traditional conservative agendas.
The war with Iraq has been an economic catastrophe,
coupled with a sinking dollar, spiraling debt, and surging oil prices.
Much of the U.S. public debt is now in the hands of an adversary, China.
A war against Iran will bring a terrible “energy shock”
and will only make things worse for the average American.
It could sink the U.S. dollar forever
as the world flees from its use as a reserve currency.
As Ron Paul put it,
“The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington
are to protect our liberty,
not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars,
while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.”
[8]
Finally, conservatives traditionally understand that
foreign and defense policy
should ultimately benefit the United States and its people.
The government should be empowered
to protect American citizens against foreign threats and terrorism,
not to create new terrorists through ill-advised interventions overseas.
Our nation,
which has always been respected for its fair dealing and its liberties,
is now looked down upon by most of the world
due to its bullying and intransigence.
John Quincy Adams said that
“America does not need to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”
Attacking Iran would unleash a new wave of international terrorism
and would convince much of the world that
Washington is intent on changing governments willy-nilly
and exterminating Muslims.
America does not need another 9/11.
Referring to the terrorism problem, Pat Buchanan has written,
“We need to remove the motivation for it
by extricating the United States from ethnic, religious, and historical quarrels that are not ours
and which we cannot resolve with any finality.”
George Washington put it another way in his Farewell Address,
that the United States should
“Observe good faith and justice towards all nations;
cultivate peace and harmony with all.
Religion and morality enjoin this conduct;
and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it.
It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation,
to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example
of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.”
George Washington’s advice, once revered by all true conservatives,
was good in 1796, and it is still good today.
2009
2009-11-18-Harbaugh-Hagel
After the overwhelming Democratic sweep in the 2008 elections,
the GOP has been characterized, correctly, by the media
as having rather few apparent leaders who command a national following.
I agree.
Here is a man who, in my opinion, could be an outstanding GOP leader: Chuck Hagel.
He combines general social and economic conservatism and honorable service in the Vietnam War
with a long-standing opposition to the unnecessary US/Muslim wars.
What more could the GOP ask?
Obviously, there are many other candidates, and others will disagree.
But Hagel should, in my opinion, be,
with Huckabee, Palin, Romney, Gingrich, et al,
considered as a GOP leader,
by the media and the party.
Here is the problem:
Without him, around whom can anti-war Republicans coalesce?
So far as I know,
all the current GOP heavyweights are practically indistinguishable
with regard to war policies and Mid-East policies.
As widely remarked, they compete only to see
who can most slavishly proclaim devotion to Israel.
Is this a healthy political situation for the United States?
Of course not.
What better proof is there of Zionist domination of American politics?
And even if that is too controversial for you to stomach,
here is a question for GOP leaders:
Just where are anti-war conservatives supposed to go?
How many votes are you going to lose by not offering an alternative?
If anti-war fervor builds in this country, as it well might,
where is the GOP candidate who can credibly say,
“I opposed the war all along”,
and avoid a Democratic charge of being
merely opportunistic rather than principled
in a future election?
As to why the fine American Hagel has been so neglected by the GOP leadership,
see this post by Stephen Walt.
[1]
The Republican win in the special Senate election in Massachusetts
has been compared to a powerful earthquake
that could transform U.S. politics as we know it,
pointing to a forceful populist uprising that reflects the rage of
the economically distressed and politically frustrated American voters
who are ready to storm the barricades and get rid of
the crooked politicians on Capitol Hill and the Fat Cats in Wall Street.
[2]
According to the conventional wisdom,
much of this populist fury has been fostered by the members and the groups
that constitute the Tea Party movement --
who had backed Republican Scott Brown in the Senate race in Massachusetts --
and have created a political backlash against
the growing government intervention in the American economy
under President Obama and the Congressional Democrats,
that has taken the form of
the bailouts of the big banks and the auto companies,
the costly fiscal and monetary policies
(the economic stimulus program
and the injection of liquidity into the financial system),
and of course, the much derided health-care reform plan.
[3]
It is not surprising that Americans who according to opinion polls
are feeling worried about
unemployment, the value of their homes, and the availability of credit
are being energized to take political action.
What is intriguing, however, is that
at a time when the U.S. military
has been fighting two very expansive wars in the Broader Middle East
(Afghanistan and Iraq -- and soon perhaps another one with Iran)
while terrorism continues to be seen as a threat to American security,
the populist insurgents seem to have been relatively silent
when it comes to dead-end American foreign policy
and the high costs in blood and treasure
of the never-ending U.S. global interventionism.
They have been castigating the political and economic elites -- as they should.
But why do the foreign policy and military elites
seem to be immune to the wrath of the new populists?
[4]
Interestingly enough, opinion polls indicate that
most Americans are growing disenchanted with American global interventionism.
Indeed, when Americans were asked in a recent survey of American attitudes conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whether the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally,”
49 percent said they agreed with that sentiment.
That was up sharply from 30 percent in 2002, and was the highest reading found
since the Gallup Survey first asked the question in 1964.
These results seem to be compatible with the findings in other opinion polls
that reflect
continuing public disillusionment with the Iraq War
and a clear support for
a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from both Mesopotamia and Afghanistan.
[5]
So in a way, it seems that
as many Americans are unhappy with
Wall Street’s bailout and the health care reform bill
as they are with
the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yet while the domestic policy issues seemed to have been the focus of the debate during the Senate race in Massachusetts,
America’s wars have received much less attention.
If anything, the Republican Brown ended-up attacking Obama’s foreign policy
from a more pro-interventionist perspective
when he called for
sending all the additional troops
that General Stanley McChrystal had requested.
[6]
Similarly, some of the stars of the Tea Party movement like
former Alaska Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and
news show host Glenn Beck
have accused President Obama of
projecting weakness in dealing with the threat of terrorism
and have appealed for more assertive U.S. policy
vis-à-vis Iran, North Korea and Russia.
At the same time, another political figure that has been much admired
by many of the new populists is Dr. Ron Paul
(I served as one of his foreign policy advisors during the campaign),
the Republican-libertarian Representative from Texas
who has been a staunch opponent of the decision to invade Iraq
and has called for U.S. military disengagement from the Middle East
as well as from other parts of the world --
not to mention his long-time criticism of
much the rising power of the National Security State.
[7]
It is possible that one of the main reasons why foreign policy issues,
including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
have not dominated the tea Party events
has to do with the fact that new populists may have strong disagreements over
the role that the United States should play in the world
as well as over immigration and trade and social-cultural issues.
Hence, my sense (which is based more on anecdotal evidence
than on the results of any major opinion poll)
is that while
most of the new insurgents project a Lou Dobbs-kind of attitude on immigration,
the Perot-type populists among them have been supportive of
a more economist nationalist approach on global trade issues --
like many progressive populists on the political left --
and of a less interventionist foreign policy,
not unlike the followers of Ron Paul among the Tea Party members
(On social-cultural issues,
“Peroites” and “Paulites” very much like left-wing progressives
tend to embrace a more liberal/libertarian perspective
in contrast to the Sarah Palin wing of the Tea Party that includes members of the religious right).
[8]
If we apply
the foreign policy typology proposed by diplomatic scholar Walter Russell Mead
it would be safe to argue that there are very few
Wilsonians aka neoconservatives
fantasizing about the democratization of the Middle East or
Hamiltonians seeking to promote U.S. business interests abroad
among the Tea Partiers.
Instead, one could suggest that most of the new populists are either
nationalist Jacksonians -
who have no problem using force in defense of the country
but are opposed to launching ideological global crusades --
or the more isolationist Jeffersonians -
who are worried about the negative effects that foreign interventions would have
on America’s political and economic freedoms.
[9]
While
the non-interventionist/Jeffersonian approach
represented by Paul and other libertarian figures and outlets and
the populist/Jacksonian position
advocated by the Peroites and Pat Buchanan
may be popular among the new populists,
the main reason
that they have failed to have more of an impact
on the right-wing populist insurgents
has to do with the strong influence of
the elites controlling the Republican Party
and the official conservative movement --
as opposed to, say,
the views represented in The American Conservative magazine (I write for it) -- which continue to promote
the interventionist foreign policy principles
advocated by the neocons and the religious right
with their emphasis on the need to escalate the war against “Islamofascism,”
That explains why the majority of the Republicans and conservatives
are still in favor of an interventionist U.S. foreign policy,
a reality that is not going to change
until the Jacksonians and the Jeffersonians
start using their intellectual and political resources
to advance their agenda.
[The real question is why so few of the conservative political/media elite
has chosen to support the non-interventionist views of
Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, perhaps Chuck Hagel, and even Michael Scheuer.
I suspect the reason is that old classic m-o-n-e-y,
and the desires of those who supply most of it.]
[10]
Unfortunately for President Obama and the Democrats,
the White House’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan
and to pursue a Bush/neoconservative-Lite foreign policy
makes it difficult for them to try to exploit the populist sentiments
by trying to project a less interventionist foreign policy.
* Karen Kwiatkowski — retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
* Philip M. Giraldi — former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, current Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance, and weekly columnist for Antiwar.com
* Jacob Hornberger — founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
* Bruce Fein — former associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration
[This speech was part of a panel sponsored by
the Future of Freedom Foundation,
Campaign for Liberty and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance (LOLA)
held on February 20th at the 2010 CPAC.
The panel presentation was titled
“Why Real Conservatives Are Against the War on Terror.”]
2010-03-01-TAC-Carey-Right-and-Hundred-Years-War
In From the Cold
The Right should not wage a Hundred Years War.
By George W. Carey
The American Conservative, 2010-03-01
[I think Raimondo is being excessively harsh on Paul.
Perfection would be nice, but is rarely achievable,
especially in political candidates.
I would vote for Paul if I had the opportunity.]
[1]
LONG after the dust settles in Iowa — and New Hampshire, and even the 2016 campaign itself —
one question will remain:
Why, after decades of supporting the liberal and conservative establishments,
did the white middle-class abandon them?
Wherever Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders end up,
their candidacies represent a major shift in American politics.
Since World War II our political culture has been organized around the needs, fears and aspirations of white middle-class voters
in ways that also satisfied the interests of the rich and powerful. That’s no longer true.
[2]
As we know, the rich are now quite a bit richer.
In itself, this need not disrupt the old political consensus.
More decisive is the fact that the white middle class is in decline, both economically and culturally.
[3]
This story of decline is often told in racial and ethnic terms:
White America is being displaced by a multicultural America,
and especially on the right, voters are retreating to racist posturing.
There may be some truth to this story, but for the most part it’s a huge distraction.
[4]
In fact, the real cleavage is not interracial, but intra-racial:
The populism we’re seeing stems entirely from the collision of whites who flourish in the global economy —
and amid the cultural changes of the last 50 years —
with those who don’t.
[5]
And while we’ve heard a lot about the economic decline of the middle class,
the cultural decline of the white middle class isn’t discussed nearly as often.
It should be.
[6]
First, there are the consequences of the great success of the upper middle class,
which today lives in a separate world of well-manicured neighborhoods
with good schools, intact families and cultural confidence.
We compliment ourselves that a generally meritocratic system is open to far more people than was true 50 years ago.
And it has been — but the resulting culture of ambition paradoxically erodes middle-class confidence.
Today, the vast middle of the middle fears that unless you’re on the way up, you’re on the way down.
[7]
And it’s not just competitiveness that is eroding the white middle class.
When I was coming of age in the 1970s, drug use was already undermining the white middle class.
Since then marriage rates among high school-educated whites have declined and illegitimacy has increased.
A priest I know serves three small-town parishes in rural, white Pennsylvania.
I asked about his pastoral challenges.
The biggest: Grandparents parenting their grandchildren,
as their own children are too messed up to raise them.
[8]
Cultural instability compounds economic instability.
A person near the median in our society is on shaky ground.
He feels that what was once reliable is now eroding.
This is as much a source of today’s middle-class anxiety as stagnant household incomes.
[9]
What’s striking — and crucial for understanding our populist moment —
is the fact that the leadership cadres of both parties aren’t just unresponsive to this anxiety.
They add to it.
[10]
The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters.
Sometimes, those voters are described as racists,
or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.”
The message:
White middle-class Americans aren’t just irrelevant to America’s future,
they’re in the way.
[11]
Conservatives are no less harsh.
Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.”
The message:
If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed.
And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.
[12]
Is it any surprise that white middle-class voters are in rebellion?
[13]
Democratic and Republican Party establishments appeal to the interests of these voters,
promising to protect them (Democrats)
or spur growth that will renew economic opportunity (Republicans).
But these appeals miss the point.
[14]
Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on
the willingness of white middle-class voters
to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite:
Resist Communism!
Send a man to the moon!
Overcome racism!
Protect the environment!
Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics.
They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.
[Way, way too psychological.
There are real issues that legitimately concern, and should concern, white middle-class voters.
As to what those issues are,
Patrick J. Buchanan has done an absolutely great job of articulating those issues in his books.
To understand those issues, three of his books are critical:
The Great Betrayal, on economics;
A Republic, Not an Empire, on foreign policy; and
Suicide of a Superpower, on demographics, immigration, and culture.
To turn the concerns of the white middle-class
into an exercise in "their sense of political self-worth"
is to wildly avoid confronting the real issues.]
[15]
This is precisely what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders offer.
Mr. Trump speaks about restoring American greatness,
rhetorical gestures akin to Barack Obama’s vague 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can.”
We can mock both as empty.
But voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise.
They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country,
not recipients of their benevolent ministrations,
which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.
[16]
Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has
to recover its central role in the national project.
While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump,
the appeal is the same.
He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy.
We can dismiss his socialism as an unworkable throwback,
but he’s doing something our political establishment can’t or won’t:
asking middle-class voters to undertake a nation-defining transformation.
[17]
If these candidates have traction,
it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white,
have decided, for different reasons,
that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision,
a future that they believe they will run.
This primary season will show us whether or not they’re right.
While their immediate goal is to deny him the nomination,
do they really think that if the party nominates Rubio,
things can be again as they were before Trump?
Do they not see that America and the West are undergoing a series of crises
that will change our world forever?
Bernie Sanders is not all wrong. There is a revolution going on.
Late in the last century, when Robert Bartley was editorial editor,
The Wall Street Journal championed a constitutional amendment of five words —
“There shall be open borders.”
Bartley, who told colleague Peter Brimelow, “I think the nation-state is finished,”
wanted U.S. borders thrown open to people and goods from all over the world.
To Bartley and his acolytes,
what made America one nation and one people was simply an ideology.
But what was silly then is suicidal today.
Whatever one may think of Trump’s talk of building a wall,
does anyone think the United States is not going to have to build a security fence to defend our bleeding 2,000-mile border?
Given the huge trade deficits with China, Japan, Mexico and the EU,
the hemorrhaging of manufacturing,
the stagnation of wages and the decline of the middle class,
does anyone think that if Trump is turned back,
the GOP can continue on being a free-trade party financed by
the Beltway agents of transnational corporations? [Buchanan omits the financiers of Wall Street, and the casino magnates.]
Absent some major attack on the homeland,
do our foreign policy elites believe the American people would support
new U.S. interventions
to defeat, occupy and tutor Third World nations in liberal democracy?
[I would go farther.
Even if there were a "major attack on the homeland",
that would not, in my opinion, necessarily justify a foreign intervention,
which might only produce more problems than solutions.]
Trump is winning because,
on immigration, amnesty, securing our border
and staying out of any new crusades for democracy,
he has tapped into the most powerful currents in politics:
economic populism and “America First” nationalism.
Look at the crowds Trump draws.
Look at the record turnouts in Republican caucuses and primaries.
If Beltway Republicans think they can stop Trump and turn back the movement behind him,
and continue on with today’s policies on trade, immigration and intervention,
they will be swept into the same dustbin of history as the Rockefeller Republicans.
America is saying, “Goodbye to all that.”
For Trump is not only a candidate.
He is a messenger from Middle America.
And the message he is delivering to the establishment is:
We want an end to your policies and we want an end to you.
If the elites think they can not only deny Trump the nomination,
but turn back this revolution and re-establish themselves in the esteem of the people,
they delude themselves.
This is hubris of a high order.
[I agree with Buchanan.
It is important to separate the messenger (Trump) from the message he is delivering,
that the policies that Buchanan cites are loathed by many.
My problems with Trump are not only some of his personal characteristics,
e.g., his inappropriately personal and unjustified attack on Megyn Kelly,
but more fundamentally with his message:
That he oversimplifies, overpromises, and fails to talk about
the downside of the policies that are necessary to avoid the problems Buchanan cites.
Take, for example, feminism.
Can America
provide the work environment that feminists want,
provide all the "health care" that the health care activists advocate,
and still be competitive in the global marker?
Germany and Switzerland are perhaps the closest instances of meeting all three of those goals.
But America is not those nations, demographically, racially, or culturally.
That is a fact, and I believe a relevant fact.]
Let me offer my unabashed opinion on what person in the public spotlight
has offered the most consistently wise opinions on matters of importance,
in foreign policy, domestic policy, and social issues,
over the years since, say, 1970:
Patrick J. Buchanan.
Three of his books articulate his overall platform,
and its appeal to me:
Beyond his books,
here are some samples of his wisdom,
some of the posts in his blog, some other on-line work of his
(but the emphasis has been added by the author of the current blog),
and videos of his "Culture War" speech at the 1992 Republican convention:
Whose War Is This?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
buchanan.org (his blog), 2001-09-28
[0.1]
In his resolve to hunt down and kill the Osama bin Laden terrorists he says
committed the Sept. 11 massacres,
President Bush has behind him a nation more unified than it has been since Pearl Harbor.
But now Bush has been put on notice that this war cannot end
with the head of bin Laden and the overthrow of the Taliban.
[0.2]
The shot across Bush’s bow came in an “Open Letter”
co-signed by 41 foreign-policy scholars,
including William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the publisher of The Weekly Standard and the editor in chief of The New Republic —
essentially, the entire neoconservative establishment.
[0.3]
What must Bush do to retain their support? Target Hezbollah for destruction and retaliate against Syria and Iran
if they refuse to cut all ties to Hezbollah
and move militarily to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
Failure to attack Iraq, the neocons warn Bush,
“will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
[0.4]
“Our purpose in writing is to assure you of our support as you do what must be done
to lead the nation to victory in this fight,” the letter ends.
[0.5]
Implied is a threat to end support
if Bush does not widen the war to include all of Israel’s enemies,
or if he pursues the U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition of Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Among the signers is Richard Perle, chairman of Bush’s own Defense Policy Board, a key advisory group.
[0.6]
This letter represents one side of a brutal policy battle that has erupted in the capital:
Is it to be Powell’s war or Perle’s war?
1. A CRITICAL DECISION
[1.1]
The final decision Bush makes will be as historically crucial as
Truman’s decision to let MacArthur advance to the Yalu,
and FDR’s decision to hold up Eisenhower’s armies and let Stalin take Berlin.
[1.2]
How the president will come down is unknown.
[1.3]
In his address to Congress a week ago, Bush declared:
“From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism
will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
The president seemed to be offering amnesty, or conditional absolution,
to rogue states if they enlist in America’s war, now, and expel all terrorist cells.
[1.4]
Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is signaling that what matters
is not where nations stood, but where they stand.
On Sunday, he said on CBS:
“What we are looking at today is how are these states going to behave going forward.”
[1.5]
And Powell’s coalition is coming together.
Whether out of fear or opportunism, Libya, Syria, Iran and the Palestinian Authority have all denounced the atrocities of Sept. 11.
Pakistan has joined the coalition. Sudan is cooperating.
[1.6]
But calls for a wider war dominate the neoconservative media.
The Weekly Standard’s opinion editor, David Tell, wants war not only on past sponsors of terror,
but also on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
[1.7]
Bennett wants Congress to declare war on “militant Islam”
and “overwhelming force” used on state sponsors of terror
such as Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and even China.
The Wall Street Journal wants strikes
“aimed at terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.”
2. ON THEIR LISTS
[2.1]
Terrorism expert Steve Emerson puts Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley at the top of his list.
Benjamin Netanyahu includes in the “Empire of Terror” to be obliterated:
Hamas, Hezbollah, “the Palestinian enclave,” as well as Iran, Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan.
Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century want Iraq invaded now:
“Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. …
The larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over.”
[2.2]
As of now, Bush is laser-focused on bin Laden and the Taliban.
But when that war is over, the great policy battle will be decided:
Do we then dynamite Powell’s U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition by using U.S. power to invade Iraq?
Do we then reverse alliances and make Israel’s war America’s war?
3. ALLIES WOULD BE AT RISK
[3.1]
If the United States invades Iraq, bombs Hezbollah and conducts strikes on Syria and Iran,
this war will metastasize into a two-continent war from Algeria to Afghanistan,
with the United States and Israel alone against a half-dozen Arab and Muslim states.
The first casualties would be the moderate Arabs —
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states —
who were our Cold War and Gulf War allies.
[3.2]
The war Netanyahu and the neo cons want,
with the United States and Israel fighting all of the radical Islamic states,
is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers hoped to ignite
when they sent those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
[3.3]
If America wishes truly to be isolated, it will follow the neoconservative line.
Conservatives should stand squarely with President Bush — and Gen. Powell.
2003-03-24-PJB-whose-war
Whose War? A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
The American Conservative, 2003-03-24
The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers … that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”
Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.
Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)
David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. … Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”
Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London … one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”
Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of … Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”
Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris Matthews, Robert Novak, Georgie Anne Geyer, Jason Vest of the Nation, and Gary Hart of implying that “members of the Bush team have been doing Israel’s bidding and, by extension, exhibiting ‘dual loyalties.’” Kaplan thunders:
The real problem with such claims is not just that they are untrue. The problem is that they are toxic. Invoking the specter of dual loyalty to mute criticism and debate amounts to more than the everyday pollution of public discourse. It is the nullification of public discourse, for how can one refute accusations grounded in ethnicity? The charges are, ipso facto, impossible to disprove. And so they are meant to be.
What is going on here? Slate’s Mickey Kaus nails it in the headline of his retort: “Lawrence Kaplan Plays the Anti-Semitic Card.”
What Kaplan, Brooks, Boot, and Kagan are doing is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson does when caught with some mammoth contribution from a Fortune 500 company he has lately accused of discriminating. He plays the race card. So, too, the neoconservatives are trying to fend off critics by assassinating their character and impugning their motives.
Indeed, it is the charge of “anti-Semitism” itself that is toxic. For this venerable slander is designed to nullify public discourse by smearing and intimidating foes and censoring and blacklisting them and any who would publish them. Neocons say we attack them because they are Jewish. We do not. We attack them because their warmongering threatens our country, even as it finds a reliable echo in Ariel Sharon.
And this time the boys have cried “wolf” once too often. It is not working. As Kaus notes, Kaplan’s own New Republic carries Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman. In writing of the four power centers in this capital that are clamoring for war, Hoffman himself describes the fourth thus:
And, finally, there is a loose collection of friends of Israel, who believe in the identity of interests between the Jewish state and the United States. … These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
“If Stanley Hoffman can say this,” asks Kaus, “why can’t Chris Matthews?” Kaus also notes that Kaplan somehow failed to mention the most devastating piece tying the neoconservatives to Sharon and his Likud Party.
In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council. (Abrams is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, editor emeritus of Commentary, whose magazine has for decades branded critics of Israel as anti-Semites.)
Noting that Sharon repeatedly claims a “special closeness” to the Bushites, Kaiser writes, “For the first time a U.S. administration and a Likud government are pursuing nearly identical policies.” And a valid question is: how did this come to be, and while it is surely in Sharon’s interest, is it in America’s interest?
This is a time for truth. For America is about to make a momentous decision: whether to launch a series of wars in the Middle East that could ignite the Clash of Civilizations against which Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has warned, a war we believe would be a tragedy and a disaster for this Republic. To avert this war, to answer the neocon smears, we ask that our readers review their agenda as stated in their words. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. As Al Smith used to say, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.”
We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.
Not in our lifetimes has America been so isolated from old friends. Far worse, President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.
They charge us with anti-Semitism—i.e., a hatred of Jews for their faith, heritage, or ancestry. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a “passionate attachment” to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.
The Neoconservatives
Who are the neoconservatives? The first generation were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A neoconservative, wrote Kevin Phillips back then, is more likely to be a magazine editor than a bricklayer. Today, he or she is more likely to be a resident scholar at a public policy institute such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) or one of its clones like the Center for Security Policy or the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). As one wag writes, a neocon is more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.
Almost none came out of the business world or military, and few if any came out of the Goldwater campaign. The heroes they invoke are Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).
All are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed. Among their luminaries are Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak, and James Q. Wilson.
Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power.
Beating the War Drums
When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.
The War Party’s plan, however, had been in preparation far in advance of 9/11. And when President Bush, after defeating the Taliban, was looking for a new front in the war on terror, they put their precooked meal in front of him. Bush dug into it.
Before introducing the script-writers of America’s future wars, consider the rapid and synchronized reaction of the neocons to what happened after that fateful day.
On Sept. 12, Americans were still in shock when Bill Bennett told CNN that we were in “a struggle between good and evil,” that the Congress must declare war on “militant Islam,” and that “overwhelming force” must be used. Bennett cited Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and China as targets for attack. Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists. How did Bennett know which nations must be smashed before he had any idea who attacked us?
The Wall Street Journal immediately offered up a specific target list, calling for U.S. air strikes on “terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt.” Yet, not one of Bennett’s six countries, nor one of these five, had anything to do with 9/11.
On Sept. 15, according to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, “Paul Wolfowitz put forth military arguments to justify a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than Afghanistan.” Why Iraq? Because, Wolfowitz argued in the War Cabinet, while “attacking Afghanistan would be uncertain … Iraq was a brittle oppressive regime that might break easily. It was doable.”
On Sept. 20, forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol, and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers’ support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah for destruction, retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to sever ties to Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush, “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.”
Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon.
President Bush had been warned. He was to exploit the attack of 9/11 to launch a series of wars on Arab regimes, none of which had attacked us. All, however, were enemies of Israel. “Bibi” Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, like some latter-day Citizen Genet, was ubiquitous on American television, calling for us to crush the “Empire of Terror.” The “Empire,” it turns out, consisted of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, and “the Palestinian enclave.”
Nasty as some of these regimes and groups might be, what had they done to the United States?
The War Party seemed desperate to get a Middle East war going before America had second thoughts. Tom Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) called for an immediate invasion of Iraq. “Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. … [T]he larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over,” he wrote.
Donnelly was echoed by Jonah Goldberg of National Review: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.”
Goldberg endorsed “the Ledeen Doctrine” of ex-Pentagon official Michael Ledeen, which Goldberg described thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” (When the French ambassador in London, at a dinner party, asked why we should risk World War III over some “shitty little country”—meaning Israel—Goldberg’s magazine was not amused.)
Ledeen, however, is less frivolous. In The War Against the Terror Masters, he identifies the exact regimes America must destroy:
First and foremost, we must bring down the terror regimes, beginning with the Big Three: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. And then we have to come to grips with Saudi Arabia. … Once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged. …We have to ensure the fulfillment of the democratic revolution. … Stability is an unworthy American mission, and a misleading concept to boot. We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize.
Rejecting stability as “an unworthy American mission,” Ledeen goes on to define America’s authentic “historic mission”:
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. … [W]e must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
Passages like this owe more to Leon Trotsky than to Robert Taft and betray a Jacobin streak in neoconservatism that cannot be reconciled with any concept of true conservatism.
To the Weekly Standard, Ledeen’s enemies list was too restrictive. We must not only declare war on terror networks and states that harbor terrorists, said the Standard, we should launch wars on “any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future.”
Robert Kagan and William Kristol were giddy with excitement at the prospect of Armageddon. The coming war “is going to spread and engulf a number of countries. … It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid. … [I]t is possible that the demise of some ‘moderate’ Arab regimes may be just round the corner.”
Norman Podhoretz in Commentary even outdid Kristol’s Standard, rhapsodizing that we should embrace a war of civilizations, as it is George W. Bush’s mission “to fight World War IV—the war against militant Islam.” By his count, the regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘“friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority. Bush must reject the “timorous counsels” of the “incorrigibly cautious Colin Powell,” wrote Podhoretz, and “find the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated” Islamic world. As the war against al-Qaeda required that we destroy the Taliban, Podhoretz wrote,
We may willy-nilly find ourselves forced … to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority). I can even [imagine] the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. … I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.
Podhoretz credits Eliot Cohen with the phrase “World War IV.” Bush was shortly thereafter seen carrying about a gift copy of Cohen’s book that celebrates civilian mastery of the military in times of war, as exhibited by such leaders as Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion.
A list of the Middle East regimes that Podhoretz, Bennett, Ledeen, Netanyahu, and the Wall Street Journal regard as targets for destruction thus includes Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and “militant Islam.”
Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?
Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.
Indeed, Sharon has been everywhere the echo of his acolytes in America. In February 2003, Sharon told a delegation of Congressmen that, after Saddam’s regime is destroyed, it is of “vital importance” that the United States disarm Iran, Syria, and Libya.
“We have a great interest in shaping the Middle East the day after” the war on Iraq, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz told the Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations. After U.S. troops enter Baghdad, the United States must generate “political, economic, diplomatic pressure” on Tehran, Mofaz admonished the American Jews.
Are the neoconservatives concerned about a war on Iraq bringing down friendly Arab governments? Not at all. They would welcome it.
“Mubarak is no great shakes,” says Richard Perle of the President of Egypt. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” Asked about the possibility that a war on Iraq—which he predicted would be a “cakewalk”—might upend governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, former UN ambassador Ken Adelman told Joshua Micah Marshall of Washington Monthly, “All the better if you ask me.”
On July 10, 2002, Perle invited a former aide to Lyndon LaRouche named Laurent Murawiec to address the Defense Policy Board. In a briefing that startled Henry Kissinger, Murawiec named Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” of the United States.
Washington should give Riyadh an ultimatum, he said. Either you Saudis “prosecute or isolate those involved in the terror chain, including the Saudi intelligence services,” and end all propaganda against Israel, or we invade your country, seize your oil fields, and occupy Mecca.
In closing his PowerPoint presentation, Murawiec offered a “Grand Strategy for the Middle East.” “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize.” Leaked reports of Murawiec’s briefing did not indicate if anyone raised the question of how the Islamic world might respond to U.S. troops tramping around the grounds of the Great Mosque.
What these neoconservatives seek is to conscript American blood to make the world safe for Israel. They want the peace of the sword imposed on Islam and American soldiers to die if necessary to impose it.
Washington Times editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave calls this the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine.” “Washington’s ‘Likudniks,’” he writes, “have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.”
The neocons seek American empire, and Sharonites seek hegemony over the Middle East. The two agendas coincide precisely. And though neocons insist that it was Sept. 11 that made the case for war on Iraq and militant Islam, the origins of their war plans go back far before.
“Securing the Realm”
The principal draftsman is Richard Perle, an aide to Sen. Scoop Jackson, who, in 1970, was overheard on a federal wiretap discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli Embassy. In Jews and American Politics, published in 1974, Stephen D. Isaacs wrote, “Richard Perle and Morris Amitay command a tiny army of Semitophiles on Capitol Hill and direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” In 1983, the New York Times reported that Perle had taken substantial payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.
In 1996, with Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, Perle wrote “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In it, Perle, Feith, and Wurmser urged Bibi to ditch the Oslo Accords of the assassinated Yitzak Rabin and adopt a new aggressive strategy:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.
In the Perle-Feith-Wurmser strategy, Israel’s enemy remains Syria, but the road to Damascus runs through Baghdad. Their plan, which urged Israel to re-establish “the principle of preemption,” has now been imposed by Perle, Feith, Wurmser & Co. on the United States.
In his own 1997 paper, “A Strategy for Israel,” Feith pressed Israel to re-occupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control,” though “the price in blood would be high.”
Wurmser, as a resident scholar at AEI, drafted joint war plans for Israel and the United States “to fatally strike the centers of radicalism in the Middle East. Israel and the United States should … broaden the conflict to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza. That would establish the recognition that fighting either the United States or Israel is suicidal.”
He urged both nations to be on the lookout for a crisis, for as he wrote, “Crises can be opportunities.” Wurmser published his U.S.-Israeli war plan on Jan. 1, 2001, nine months before 9/11.
About the Perle-Feith-Wurmser cabal, author Michael Lind writes:
The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectuals joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such “neo-conservatives” is the power and reputation of Israel.
Right down the smokestack.
Perle today chairs the Defense Policy Board, Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser is special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, John Bolton, who dutifully echoes the Perle-Sharon line. According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, in late February,
U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials … that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards.
On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime the “aim of American foreign policy” and to use military action because “diplomacy is failing.” Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would “offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.” Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine
In 1992, a startling document was leaked from the office of Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post called it a “classified blueprint intended to help ‘set the nation’s direction for the next century.’” The Wolfowitz Memo called for a permanent U.S. military presence on six continents to deter all “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” Containment, the victorious strategy of the Cold War, was to give way to an ambitious new strategy designed to “establish and protect a new order.”
Though the Wolfowitz Memo was denounced and dismissed in 1992, it became American policy in the 33-page National Security Strategy (NSS) issued by President Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Washington Post reporter Tim Reich describes it as a “watershed in U.S. foreign policy” that “reverses the fundamental principles that have guided successive Presidents for more than 50 years: containment and deterrence.”
Andrew Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, writes of the NSS that he marvels at “its fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik. It reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensibly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
In confronting America’s adversaries, the paper declares, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” It warns any nation that seeks to acquire power to rival the United States that it will be courting war with the United States:
[T]he president has no intention of allowing any nation to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago. … Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing or equaling the power of the United States.
America must reconcile herself to an era of “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy,” Robert Kagan instructs. But this Pax Americana the neocons envision bids fair to usher us into a time of what Harry Elmer Barnes called “permanent war for permanent peace.”
The Munich Card
As President Bush was warned on Sept. 20, 2001, that he will be indicted for “a decisive surrender” in the war on terror should he fail to attack Iraq, he is also on notice that pressure on Israel is forbidden. For as the neoconservatives have played the anti-Semitic card, they will not hesitate to play the Munich card as well. A year ago, when Bush called on Sharon to pull out of the West Bank, Sharon fired back that he would not let anyone do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain had done to the Czechs. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy immediately backed up Ariel Sharon:
With each passing day, Washington appears to view its principal Middle Eastern ally’s conduct as inconvenient—in much the same way London and Paris came to see Czechoslovakia’s resistance to Hitler’s offers of peace in exchange for Czech lands.
When former U.S. NATO commander Gen. George Jouwlan said the United States may have to impose a peace on Israel and the Palestinians, he, too, faced the charge of appeasement. Wrote Gaffney,
They would, presumably, go beyond Britain and France’s sell-out of an ally at Munich in 1938. The “impose a peace” school is apparently prepared to have us play the role of Hitler’s Wehrmacht as well, seizing and turning over to Yasser Arafat the contemporary Sudetenland: the West Bank and Gaza Strip and perhaps part of Jerusalem as well.
Podhoretz agreed Sharon was right in the substance of what he said but called it politically unwise to use the Munich analogy.
President Bush is on notice: Should he pressure Israel to trade land for peace, the Oslo formula in which his father and Yitzak Rabin believed, he will, as was his father, be denounced as an anti-Semite and a Munich-style appeaser by both Israelis and their neoconservatives allies inside his own Big Tent.
Yet, if Bush cannot deliver Sharon there can be no peace. And if there is no peace in the Mideast there is no security for us, ever—for there will be no end to terror. As most every diplomat and journalist who travels to the region will relate, America’s failure to be even-handed, our failure to rein in Sharon, our failure to condemn Israel’s excesses, and our moral complicity in Israel’s looting of Palestinian lands and denial of their right to self-determination sustains the anti-Americanism in the Islamic world in which terrorists and terrorism breed.
Let us conclude. The Israeli people are America’s friends and have a right to peace and secure borders. We should help them secure these rights. As a nation, we have made a moral commitment, endorsed by half a dozen presidents, which Americans wish to honor, not to permit these people who have suffered much to see their country overrun and destroyed. And we must honor this commitment.
But U.S. and Israeli interests are not identical. They often collide, and when they do, U.S. interests must prevail. Moreover, we do not view the Sharon regime as “America’s best friend.”
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the behavior of the Israeli regime has been Jekyll and Hyde. In the 1950s, its intelligence service, the Mossad, had agents in Egypt blow up U.S. installations to make it appear the work of Cairo, to destroy U.S. relations with the new Nasser government. During the Six Day War, Israel ordered repeated attacks on the undefended USS Liberty that killed 34 American sailors and wounded 171 and included the machine-gunning of life rafts. This massacre was neither investigated nor punished by the U.S. government in an act of national cravenness.
Though we have given Israel $20,000 for every Jewish citizen, Israel refuses to stop building the settlements that are the cause of the Palestinian intifada. Likud has dragged our good name through the mud and blood of Ramallah, ignored Bush’s requests to restrain itself, and sold U.S. weapons technology to China, including the Patriot, the Phoenix air-to-air missile, and the Lavi fighter, which is based on F-16 technology. Only direct U.S. intervention blocked Israel’s sale of our AWACS system.
Israel suborned Jonathan Pollard to loot our secrets and refuses to return the documents, which would establish whether or not they were sold to Moscow. When Clinton tried to broker an agreement at Wye Plantation between Israel and Arafat, Bibi Netanyahu attempted to extort, as his price for signing, release of Pollard, so he could take this treasonous snake back to Israel as a national hero.
Do the Brits, our closest allies, behave like this?
Though we have said repeatedly that we admire much of what this president has done, he will not deserve re-election if he does not jettison the neoconservatives’ agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect.
[1.1]
“Economic unity and political unity are twins:
one cannot be born without the other following,”
said Friedrich List, the famed German economist and nationalist.
Again and again, history has proven List right.
[1.2]
Economic union leads inexorably to political union.
The left has always understood this.
The right never does, until too late.
[1.3]
When Hamilton created a free-trade zone across 13 states,
a strong U.S. central government was baked in the cake.
Bismarck used a customs union, the Zollverein,
to harness Germany under Prussia’s whip hand.
[1.4]
And thus the European Coal & Steel Community of the 1950s led to
a Common Market, a European Community,
today’s European Union
and tomorrow’s Euroland.
There, the 12 nations that are today surrendering their national currencies to adopt the “euro”
will enjoy all the liberty and independence of Rhode Island.
[1.5]
For Europe there may be no turning back.
The patriot’s vision of DeGaulle,
of a Europe of fatherlands “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” is dead.
The alternative vision of a managerial elite,
of a socialist superstate that they shall run, has triumphed.
Despising sovereignty, worshipping power,
the nameless, faceless technocrats of the EU have just taken a Great Leap Forward.
[1.6]
France, Germany and Italy, who are exchanging their money for the euro,
are surrendering control of monetary policy and, with it,
control of fiscal policy and national destiny.
Should a recession hit Italy, Rome will be in a straight jacket,
unable to run a deficit or devalue the lira.
Italy will have less freedom to act in her national interest than Argentina
in her current crisis.
[1.7]
Nevertheless, a prediction: This European superstate will not endure,
but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism.
For when the hard times come,
patriots will recapture control of their national destinies
from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.
[1.8]
Who, after all, would fight or die for the EU?
[1.9]
There are other reasons to believe the new Europe will fail.
Unlike America, where 90 percent of the people speak English,
the 300 million people in the new eurozone speak a dozen languages.
And while she remains affluent,
Europe’s dynamism is fading away along with her industrial base.
Militarily, as we saw in Kosovo, the new Europe is pathetic.
Fifty-six years after Hitler died in his bunker,
Europe requires American troops to defend her.
Europe is a gated community in an increasingly desperate global neighborhood.
[1.10]
Each year brings a new European threat to “go it alone.”
But these have begun to ring as hollow as the threats of children to run away from home,
who never quite get around to it.
As for Europe’s plan to build a 60,000-soldier Rapid Reaction Force to replace NATO,
one is tempted to say: For heaven’s sake, get on with it!
2. The demographic issues
[2.1]
Most important, Europe is dying.
There is not a single nation in all of Europe
with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive, except Muslim Albania.
In 17 European nations,
there are already more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.
[2.2]
Between 2000 and 2050, Asia, Africa and Latin America
will add 3 billion to 4 billion people – 30 to 40 new Mexicos! –
as Europe loses the equal of the entire population of
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.
By 2050, the median age in Europe will be 50,
nine years older than the oldest nation on earth today, Japan.
One in 10 Europeans will be over 80.
And who will take care of these scores of millions of elderly,
before the Dutch doctors arrive at the nursing home?
[2.3]
Immigrants is the answer,
immigrants already pouring into Europe in the hundreds of thousands annually
from the Middle East and Africa,
changing the character of the Old Continent.
Just as Europe once invaded and colonized Asia, Africa and the Near East,
the once-subject peoples are coming to colonize the mother countries.
And as the Christian churches of Europe empty out, the mosques are going up.
[2.4]
Yet, even as great nations like France, Germany, Italy and Spain
grow weary of the strain of staying independent, sovereign and free,
the sub-nations within are struggling to be born again.
In Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Corsica, the Basque country and northern Italy
are secessionist movements not unlike those that broke up
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into [24] independent nations.
[2.5]
If the alternative is the atheist-socialist superstate rising in Europe,
patriots everywhere should cheer the sub-nations.
For the world struggle that succeeds the Cold War is between patriots and globalists,
a struggle where loyalty to transnational regimes will one day
be considered treason to the nation.
I did not ask what [Bill Kristol] had been doing in New York, but thanks to the website Mondoweiss, I found out. Kristol was there for a March 16 “debate” with Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the pro-Israel organization, at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue on the Upper West Side.
After listening to Kristol, writes Phil Weiss, “I am still reeling.”
“Kristol was treated like royalty and came off as … a Republican Party warlord,” bragging “about how all the hostile elements to Israel inside the Republican Party were purged over the last 30 years — (and) no one (now) dared to question the power of the Israeli lobby.”
“The big story in the Republican Party over the last 30 years, and I’m very happy about this,” said Kristol, is the “eclipsing” of the George H.W. Bush-James Baker-Brent Scowcroft realists, “an Arabist old-fashioned Republican Party … very concerned about relations with Arab states that were not friendly with Israel … .”
That Bush crowd is yesterday, said Kristol. And not only had the “Arabists” like President Bush been shoved aside by the neocons, the “Pat Buchanan/Ron Paul type” of Republican has been purged.
“At B’nai Jeshurun,” writes Weiss, “Kristol admitted to playing a role in expelling members of the Republican Party he does not agree with.” These are Republicans you had to “repudiate,” said Kristol, people “of whom I disapprove so much that I won’t appear with them.”
“I’ve encouraged that they be expelled or not welcomed into the Republican Party. I’d be happy if Ron Paul left. I was very happy when Pat Buchanan was allowed — really encouraged … by George Bush … to go off and run as a third-party candidate.”
Kristol’s point: Refuse to toe the neo-con line on Israel, and you have no future in the Republican Party.
...
About Kristol’s comments, a point of personal privilege.
George W. Bush never “encouraged” me to go third party. At the Iowa straw poll in 1999, he asked me to stay in the party, and party chair Jim Nicholson came to my home to make the same request.
At the synagogue, Kristol was never asked about his role in the Iraq War that he and his collaborators pressured Bush to wage as “Israel‘s fight against terrorism is our fight.”
Some 4,500 Americans died in that war, 35,000 were wounded, and 100,000 Iraqis perished, leaving half a million widows and orphans.
Result: U.S. influence in the Middle East is at a nadir. Al-Qaida has spread into Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and North Africa.
Now the neocons are worming their way into the Romney camp, dropping us hints on whether John Bolton or Joe Lieberman will be the next secretary of state.
Has Gov. Romney imbibed the Kristol Kool-Aid that caused the war and cost the party Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008?
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation,
my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,”
contained this pessimistic prognosis:
“This European superstate will not endure,
but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism.
For when the hard times come,
patriots will recapture control of their national destinies
from Brussels bureaucrats to whom no one will ever give loyalty or love.”
The column described what was already happening.
“Europe is dying.
There is not a single nation in all of Europe
with a birth rate sufficient to keep its population alive, except Muslim Albania.
In 17 European nations,
there are already more burials than births, more coffins than cradles.
“Between 2000 and 2050, Asia, Africa and Latin America
will add 3 billion to 4 billion people — 30 to 40 new Mexicos! —
as Europe loses the equal of the entire population of
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany.
“By 2050, the median age in Europe will be 50,
nine years older than the oldest nation on earth today, Japan.
One in 10 Europeans will be over 80.
And who will take care of these scores of millions of elderly,
before the Dutch doctors arrive at the nursing home?
“Immigrants is the answer,
immigrants already pouring into Europe in the hundreds of thousands annually
from the Middle East and Africa,
changing the character of the Old Continent.
Just as Europe once invaded and colonized Asia, Africa and the Near East,
the once-subject peoples are coming to colonize the mother countries.
And as the Christian churches of Europe empty out, the mosques are going up.
“Yet, even as great nations like France, Germany, Italy and Spain
grow weary of the strain of staying independent, sovereign and free,
the sub-nations within are struggling to be born again.
In Scotland, Wales, Ulster, Corsica, the Basque country and northern Italy
are secessionist movements not unlike those that broke up
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into [24] independent nations.”
What was predicted, 14 years ago, has come to pass.
Migrants into Germany from the Middle and Near East reached 1 million in 2015.
EU bribes to the Turks
to keep Muslim migrants from crossing over to the Greek islands,
thence into the Balkans and Central Europe,
are unlikely to stop the flood.
My prediction that
European “patriots will recapture control of their national destinies,”
looks even more probable today.
Prime Minister David Cameron, who almost lost a referendum on Scottish secession,
is demanding a return of British sovereignty from the EU
sufficient to satisfy his countrymen,
who have been promised a vote
on whether to abandon the European Union altogether.
Marine Le Pen’s anti-EU National Front ran first
in the first round of the 2015 French elections.
Many Europeans believe she will make it into the final round
of the next presidential election in 2017.
Anti-immigrant, right-wing parties are making strides all across Europe,
as the EU is bedeviled by a host of crises.
Europe’s open borders that facilitate free trade
also assure freedom of travel to homegrown terrorists.
Mass migration into the EU is causing member nations
to put up checkpoints and close borders.
The Schengen Agreement on the free movement of goods and people
is being ignored or openly violated.
The economic and cultural clash
between a rich northern Europe and a less affluent south —
Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal —
manifest in the bad blood between Athens and Berlin,
endures.
Northern Europeans grow weary of repeated bailouts
of a south that chafes at constant northern demands for greater austerity.
Then there is the surge of sub-nationalism,
as in Scotland, Catalonia, Flanders, and Veneto,
where peoples seek to disconnect from distant capitals that no longer speak for them,
and reconnect with languages, traditions and cultures
that give more meaning to their lives
than the economics-uber-alles ideology of Frau Angela Merkel.
[Here, if the news reports are accurate, Mr. Buchanan is at least part in error.
The complaints of the Scots, it is reported,
are that the London government is not giving them enough in welfare.
How economically viable Scotland would be,
without the taxes paid by the financial gnomes of the City,
I don't know, but my guess is that the Scots want more government benefits
than they are willing to pay for.]
Moreover, the migrants entering Europe, predominantly Islamic and Third World,
are not assimilating
as did the European and largely Christian immigrants to America of a century ago.
The enclaves of Asians in Britain,
Africans and Arabs around Paris,
and Turks in and around Berlin
seem to be British, French and German in name only.
And some of their children are now heeding the call to jihad against the Crusaders invading Muslim lands.
The movement toward deeper European integration
appears to have halted, and gone into reverse,
as the EU seems to be unraveling along ideological, national, tribal and historic lines.
If these trends continue, and they seem to have accelerated in 2015,
the idea of a United States of Europe dies, and with it the EU.
And this raises a question about the most successful economic and political union in history — the USA.
How does an increasingly multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural United States
avoid the fate to which Europe appears to be headed,
when there is no identifiable racial or ethnic majority here in 2042?
Are our own political and racial divisions disappearing,
or do they, too, seem to be deepening?
Something else was revealed by the Huffington Post — a deeply embedded corruption that permeates this capital city.
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a 501(c)(3) under IRS rules, an organization exempt from U.S. taxation.
Million-dollar corporate contributions to AEI are tax-deductible.
This special privilege, this freedom from taxation, is accorded to organizations established for purposes such as “religious, educational, charitable, scientific, literary … or the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.”
What the co-conspirators of Sea Island were up at the Cloisters was about as religious as what the Bolsheviks at that girls school known as the Smolny Institute were up to in Petrograd in 1917.
‘The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t’
Pat Buchanan won after all.
But now he thinks it might be too late for the nation he was trying to save.
By Tim Alberta
Politico Magazine, 2017-04-22
