The Antiwar Right's Bent View of the World

FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | 12/16/04 | Lawrence Auster

[kattracks]

I first became aware of something deeply askew on the antiwar right shortly after it came into being in the spring of 1999, as an intellectual protest movement against the U.S. war on Serbia. I myself was deeply opposed to the war, seeing President Clinton's initiation of the conflict—on March 24, 1999, one month and twelve days after his acquittal by the U.S. Senate—as utterly lacking in moral or legal justification, and as leading to the ruin of Kosovo. While the Kosovo war is not the subject of this article, a summary of it (or at least of my view of it) will provide the background for my ensuing discussion of the antiwar right.

The Kosovo disaster

Prior to the NATO intrusion into Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, there had been a low-level civil war going on in Kosovo for many years, and it was a classic zero-sum game: at any point in time, either the Serbs were on top, and oppressed the Albanians, or the Albanians were on top, and oppressed the Serbs. There was therefore no universally "just" solution possible in Kosovo. Either one side would dominate, or the other. In the 1980s, the Albanians had the upper hand and many Serbs fled the country. The New York Times—irony of ironies—published an article on November 1, 1987 that sympathized with the plight of the Kosovo Serbs under an Albanian reign of terror. Following the election of Slobodan Milosevic as President of Serbia in 1989, which took place in response to the Albanian aggression, the tables were turned and the Serbs became dominant in Kosovo, with Albanian military groups rebelling against them and the Serbs beating the rebels back.

However, instead of accepting this latest reversal of fortune in a zero sum game in a faraway place, the U.S. government saw the prospect of a Serb victory in Kosovo as an intolerable threat to the liberal, pluralist order of Europe. The multicultural paradigm that U.S. foreign policy makers had adopted in the 1990s required that all ethnic groups in a conflict-ridden region or country, even if they are utterly incompatible with each other and are killing each other, must be made to live together rather than being allowed to resolve the conflict through war or mutual separation. Acting on these premises, and backing them up with fraudulent claims that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in Kosovo, the U.S. and NATO under Clinton's leadership issued the so-called Rambouillet Agreement—described more accurately as the Rambouillet Ultimatum—which required Serbia to submit to NATO Rule, not only in the contested province of Kosovo, but within Serbia proper. When Milosevic quite rightly rejected this outrageous and illegal demand, the U.S., as it had previously threatened (which is why the Rambouillet agreement was really an ultimatum), and without the slightest color of legal authorization from either the United Nations or the U.S. Congress, began a massive bombing campaign against Serbia and the Serb forces in Kosovo.

The next, ruinous step was predictable—and had been threatened by Milosevic himself. Now that the U.S. and NATO were engaged in an all-out effort to destroy forever the Serbs' hopes of maintaining control over their historic heartland of Kosovo, Milosevic, quite rationally if thuggishly, also decided to play for keeps. He sought to settle once and for all the ancient conflict over Kosovo by expelling all 800,000 Albanians from the province. The resulting humanitarian disaster, of a scope unseen in Europe since World War II, necessitated and justified the continuation of the very bombing campaign that had triggered the expulsion of the Albanians in the first place, since the bombing (combined in its latter stages with a threat of a land invasion) was the only way to force Milosevic to permit the Kosovar Albanians back into their country. Milosevic finally yielded to U.S. demands and the Albanians returned to their ruined land under international protection, at which point the Albanians gained decisive power in Kosovo and forced many of the remaining Serb minority to leave.

Thus, through the illegal, bullying intervention of the United States, all carried out in the name of multiculturalism and pluralism, the Kosovian zero sum game was finally settled in favor the Muslim Albanians against the Christian Serbs, and enforced by a multinational military presence that has remained in Kosovo to this day.

Such was Clinton's Kosovo war, which the Republican leadership and the neoconservatives supported from start to finish.

The antiwar right becomes the anti-American right

George Szamuely, a New York writer who had been associated with the neoconservatives and had worked for the Hudson Institute, was among those who forcefully and eloquently attacked the war. His articles were published at Antiwar.com, a website that had come into existence for the purpose of opposing the U.S. action in Kosovo. I agreed with his arguments, as I agreed with most of the other writings appearing at Antiwar.com at the time. (I also sent money to support the website.) But then something very strange happened with Szamuely, and with Antiwar.com

itself. Not content with merely opposing the U.S.-led war on Serbia, he began retrospectively attacking America's entire effort in the Cold War against the former Soviet Union. He did this by denying that Communism had ever represented a threat that needed to be stopped. It was as though, once he had switched into an oppositional mode against what he saw as the unjustified use of American power in the case of Serbia, he was compelled by some mysterious dynamic to see any use of American power abroad as wrong or imperialistic, even when that power had been used for such a righteous and necessary cause as resisting the spread of Communism, and even though he himself had previously been an anti-Communist and a supporter of the Cold War.

This came as a shock to me. And the shock didn't end there. I soon noticed a similar adversarial stance among other antiwar rightists, a wild denunciatory quality that did not confine itself to particular wrongs committed by the United States, but eagerly embraced any assertion against America, no matter how ridiculous. For example, Antiwar.com repeatedly charged that the Clinton administration was "racist" for arresting the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee as a suspected nuclear spy. The charge was ridiculous. This, after all, was the administration that had been in bed with the Red Chinese, giving them advanced missile technology in exchange for illegal Chinese contributions to the Clinton re-election campaign. This was the president who made multiculturalism our national policy, this was our "first black president," this was the president who said he eagerly looked forward to the day when America, as a result of continued mass nonwhite immigration, would no longer be a white-majority country. Could anything be sillier than to say that the Clinton administration in arresting Wen Ho Lee was driven by a racial animus against Chinese people rather than by a concern about the theft of nuclear secrets?

Furthermore, why was Antiwar.com, a supposedly right-wing

website (though its editor, Justin Raimondo, is a paleo-libertarian rather than a paleoconservative), trafficking in the kind of trumped-up racism charges that conservatives normally see as a curse on our society? The answer, as I came to realize, was that from the point of view of Antiwar.com, the Clinton administration was imperialistic, therefore it was illegitimate, and therefore it deserved whatever it got. Any crazy charge was ok, so long as it made the U.S. government look bad.

The antiwar right's turn against America, their indulgence in reckless attacks on the good faith of the American government even when it was combating espionage or containing Communism, suggested to me that at bottom many antiwar critics were not motivated by a love of country or a belief in truth, but by resentment. It was exactly the kind of resentment normally associated with the left, the impotent fury at a traitorous father figure or a supposed "oppressor" whom the supposed "oppressed," seeing himself as powerless and therefore not subject to any responsible restraints, feels justified in striking back at in any way he can. One of the typical forms this resentment took was the notion that the oppressor has no rational basis for doing what he's doing, but is acting out of insane or evil motives.

The denial of objective reality

The antiwar right's attack on virtually any use of U.S. power as sinister and irrational, as well as doomed to failure (a failure the antiwar right has often openly wished for), continued into the post 9/11 period. In the midst of the invasion of Iraq, British military historian Correlli Barnett made wildly off-base statements not only against the Iraq war, in which he virtually expressed the desire for an American defeat, but against the Cold War as well. In the April 3, 2003 edition of the Daily Mail, the mouthpiece of Britain's antiwar right, Barnett prophesied that the U.S.-led war to topple the Saddam Hussein regime had not "reached the end of the beginning"; that the Iraqi people were "rallying behind Saddam"; and that America would be humbled before the gates of Baghdad. Of course, within a few days of these dire predictions Baghdad had fallen to the victorious U.S. forces. Almost as though seeking succor for his disappointment over the results in Iraq, Barnett turned to another bad U.S. war, indeed the Mother of All Bad U.S. Wars. Writing in the May 19, 2003 issue of The American Conservative, he gave the following account of President Johnson's decision to send American forces into Vietnam:

Why did he do it? Vietnam had no oil fields, industries, or key raw materials—only rice fields. The answer lies in America's central motivation in waging the Cold War: ideological hatred of Communism.... American policy-makers did not regard the Soviet Union as simply a rival power block, but an evil empire threatening the free world. Such righteousness justified the global commitments and military adventure. [Italics added.]

In brief, America had no good reason to fear Communism or to try to protect our South Vietnamese allies from being taken over by Communist dictatorship. Not only the Vietnam war, but the entire Cold War was unnecessary, and was brought about solely by America's irrational "hatred."

What we see here is the standard leftist put-down of all non-leftist or conservative positions—namely that when conservatives are addressing some external threat to society, the threat, according to the left, doesn't really exist but is rather the result some mental sickness or political calculation on the part of the conservatives. If conservatives take a stand against Communism, it is not because of anything wrong with Communism, it's because conservatives are emotionally crippled people who need an enemy. If conservatives think that Clinton is corrupting and defiling America, it's not because of anything Clinton has done, but because of an unreasoning hatred (fed by a twisted sexual Puritanism) that they bear against Clinton. If conservatives are leery of the racial-oppression claims of the organized black movement in this country, it is not because they believe the black complaints to be false and destructive, but because, as Clinton himself repeatedly put it, whites have a sick need to "look down" on blacks. If conservatives are concerned about mass immigration, it is not because they are concerned about the harm immigration is causing to our society, but because they have an irrational "fear of those who are different." And, finally, if President Bush is waging a war against Islamic terrorists, it is not because he seeks to protect America from real harm, but because he seeks political gain through the manipulation of the public's fears. After all, as the Democratic Party's favorite filmmaker Michael Moore says, "There is no terrorist threat."

Such has been the usual left-liberal tactic, employed with increasing regularity throughout the entire post World War II period, aimed at delegitimizing non-liberal positions and preventing them even from being discussed. And now this same type of anti-American, anti-conservative propaganda has found a home in a magazine called The American Conservative. Could anybody have imagined that a publication edited by the inveterate Cold Warrior and Reagan speechwriter Patrick Buchanan would deride as a sick fantasy Reagan's historically important labeling of the USSR as an "evil empire"? Does Buchanan think that Reagan's greatest achievement—the moral condemnation, political isolation, and ultimate defeat of Soviet Communism, was really just paranoid shadow boxing?

Just as the antiwar right, along with the antiwar left, portrays international communism as a fantasy, it does the same with Islamic terrorists. The Islamists are not really enemies at all, the Antiwar Party tells us; rather the belief that they are enemies has been planted in us by propagandists. The following passage—and you may want to put on your work gloves before reading it—comes from an article by Neil Clark, a British leftist, in the December 1, 2003 issue of The American Conservative:

Arabophobia has been part of Western culture since the Crusades, with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden being bogeymen to scare our children. For centuries the Arab, despite bequeathing us the telescope, the pendulum, the watch, soap, chemistry, and modern arithmetic, has played the role of villain, seducer of our women, hustler, and thief—the barbarian lurking menacingly at the gates of civilization. In the late 20th century, new images emerged: the fanatical terrorist, the stone thrower, the suicide bomber. Now, as the Project for the New American Century suffers it first major setback in the back streets of Baghdad and Basra, Arabophobia, the one form of racism about which Hollywood does not make films, has been given a new lease of life.… Scratch a neocon, and you find an Arabophobe.

Leaving aside Clark's lurid construction of a fictional West that historically has only demonized Muslims (to the contrary, as Ibn Warraq shows in his book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, European writers have been casting a romantic, approving aura around Islam and ignoring its dark side for centuries), what Clark is saying here is beyond sick. His main point is that the terrible Islamist phenomena that have so roiled our world in recent years—Muslim suicide bombers, Osama bin Laden's fatwa to "kill Americans and Jews wherever you find them," Arab crowds dancing in ecstasy at the mass murder of Americans, and all the rest of the hellish spectacle of Islamic radicalism—are nothing more than "images" manufactured by "neocon Arabophobes" in the U.S. government in order to advance their own sinister objectives. Beyond singling out the evil neocons as the creators of these terrorist bogeymen, Clark's main aim is to render moot all criticism of and opposition to our enemies, or, rather, his aim to eliminate the belief that our enemies even exist, while sowing bitter hostility against our own side.

This is the kind of leftist poison that a once-distinguished writer at National Review, Joseph Sobran, in a celebrated essay published in 1985, described as alienism: "a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to 'build a new society' by destroying the basic institutions of the native." But, in a further sad illustration of my thesis, Sobran, in addition to becoming an outspoken Israel hater in recent years, has turned against the most basic institution of America, of which he was once a foremost champion. Having spent his entire writing career as an indefatigable exponent and defender of the U.S. Constitution against its modern statist distortions, Sobran in 2002 came out as a Rothbardian libertarian anarchist, agreeing with his newly adopted mentor, the late Murray Rothbard, that it's not the liberal perversions of the Constitution that are the problem, but the Constitution itself; that the state is "nothing but a criminal gang writ large"; and that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution meeting in Philadelphia in 1787 were engaged in a "coup d'état."

So, just as former patriots on the right have become anti-Americans, and just as former Cold Warriors on the right have become apologists for Communism, a former leading constitutionalist on the right has become an enemy of the Constitution—indeed, of the very existence of government.

The key to the destructive mindset of the antiwar right, which I hope to explore in future articles, is that their ideas about politics are not the product of rational thought and a concern for the common good. Their ideas are, very simply, the product of burning anger, a sense of perpetual hurt and victimhood. And that is why they have become so much like the left.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation. He offers a traditionalist conservative perspective at his weblog, View from the Right.

[Tolik]

Interesting article PING!

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

[ijcr]

While I value your opinion....for your own sake ensure that no one in your family gives you a labelling machine for Christmas.

Consider your health and time lost as you huddle under a lamp at night muttering to yourself and crank out such classics as; "paleo-libertarian,anarcho-capitalist,anti-federalist,"conservatives."perhaps even Arabophobic"

[Red Phillips]

Henry and Mason were wrong? So the Constitution is doing a really great job of controlling the size of the Federal Government, I guess. Just so we can establish a baseline for this argument, what percentage of the current federal government is constitutional? Is Social Security constitutional? Is Medicare? Is the Dept of Education?

The anti-federalist were precisely correct when they said the new government would come to view the Constitution as only a list of things it could not do, not as a very small and definite list of the few things it was allowed to do. Arch Federalist Hamilton said oh no it won't. Well, in the words of Dr. Phil, Mr. Hamilton how is that working for you?

[RaceBannon]

Great article!

[Red Phillips]

While labels are important and represent real differences, I am less interested in sorting people by labels, and more interested in sorting by policy and ideology. Sorting along divisions of degree, not kind, if you will. In my simplistic labeling system there are just real conservatives and fake conservatives. I generally make like cause with the real and oppose the fake. Your little jab was admittedly clever, but I'm not sure how it furthered this interesting debate.

[RaceBannon]

""He then turns around and does the exact same thing. The antiwar right is infected with "hate" and surely there is some underlying psychological motivation. Well, while I despise this type of argument, I will join Mr Auster in his hypocrisy and then promise to never do it again""

I think he is right, though.

Here is one way I put it:

On a few website bulletin boards, I have used the term PEACE NAZI to describe the peace movement in general, and one person asked me for an explanation as to what the term means and why I say it. Here is my answer:

It is intentionally derogatory, and I use it because I believe it has to be said.

It has to do with the foundation of the PEACE movement in the US and abroad and their Communist foundation, and how the majority of the signs held and slogans chanted are not about peace or genuine concern for the people of two warring countries, it is about the anti-American attitudes and the violence-inducing signs and slogans calling for violence against American Troops and President Bush.

Carrying signs calling on troops to kill their officers, to bomb Texas, for Bush to choke on a pretzel and die, for troops to shoot their officers, signs that call for communist revolution, starting fights with people who disagree with you while carrying a peace sign, trying to steal my money in Boston while carrying a peace sign and then telling me because you were shamed into giving back the money that means you are ok after all...

Things like that.

I will NOT stop using it. It is intended to make the peace protestor think.

After all the horrors we found in Iraq, you should all be thankful we went in and invaded to remove that madman. Yet, the mantra has changed, it is now against occupation! Still, not one PEACE NAZI has apologized and admitted we were right. All they do is complain that a people that were under slavery for 30 years have gone looting, and who do they blame? Why the US!! We did nothing to stop it! Maybe because we stayed out of the crowd because the PEACE NAZIS would have complained we didn’t let them vent their anger??

(As a side note, people who are now called PEACE NAZIS didn’t call on the LAPD or Federal Troops to stop the LA riots after the Rodney King riots, did they? They told us all to step back and let them vent their anger, yet all of a sudden, we are supposed to go in and use force to stop rioters in Iraq?)

And to top it off, we are flushing out the terrorists in places like Fallujah, the places where the Murderous Mullahs all take refuge, and the PEACE NAZIS have not ONCE held a rally to decry the beheadings of Americans or Iraqi CARE workers! Not one PEACE NAZI rally held to call for justice for the Killers of Daniel Pearl or any foreigner killed in Iraq!

We never intended to occupy a country like SYRIA has the last 20 years, and where are the PEACE NAZIS and their signs calling on SYRIA to leave Lebanon? They are non existent. The Syrians killed tens of thousands, chasing little children into bedrooms and shooting them point blank.

Did you know there was a Christian Community in Beirut before 1985? Now, they are almost either all killed or fled from the Syrian backed Junta, and not a peep from the PEACE NAZIS, only against American forces sent to Beirut to keep peace. Why aren’t the PEACE NAZIS arguing for the return of the Christian Community back to Beirut where they lived for 2 Millennium?

Where were the PEACE NAZIS when Israel was blockaded in 1967? Where were the PEACE NAZIS when Israel was attacked on her Holy Day of Yom Kippur in 1973? Where were the PEACE NAZIS when the PLO was shelling Katyusha rockets into Israel in 1982? Oh, Yeah, I remember, they were telling Israel to stop defending themselves!

In fact, there is not a single country that we ever went to war with that we stayed as the government power for more than 10 years! We always returned it to the people.

And that brings up another point: PEACE NAZIS are NOT against war, they are against wars that the US is engaged in to overthrow pro-Communist or PRO-radical Islamic regimes or PRO-Maoist/PRO-Stalinist regimes.

My point here, is simple: These COMMIES are not for peace. If they were, they would have been screaming about Clinton killing innocents to keep his sexual scandals off the tv,

they would have been screaming for the Palestinian Liberation Organization to stop killing Jews,

they would have been screaming for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop killing Jews,

they would have been screaming for the Hutus and Tutsis to make peace,

they would have been screaming for that madman Saddam to stop killing Kurds or Iranians,

they would have been screaming for the Turks to stop killing Kurds or Greeks,

they would have been screaming for the Chinese to stop killing Vietnamese in 1982,

they would have been screaming for the Angolan Army to stop killing with the help of the Cuban Army in the 1980's,

they would have been screaming for the Muslims to stop killing Christians in Indonesia

They would have been screaming for the Sudanese to stop the torture and slave trade which continues today

They would have been screaming when the Syrians invaded Lebanon in 1985

They would have been screaming when Pol Pot started a genocide in 1975,

They would be screaming now about Mugabe killing all the white farmers in Africa in Zimbabwe

They would have been screaming at the murders caused by the African National Congress and their necklacing of prisoners and at Winnie Mandela who was convicted of murder, yet the communists are silent

They would have been screaming about Tiananmen Square, but they are silent.

They would have been screaming about the repression in Cuba and why so many people have chosen to flee in rickety little boats, but instead they lionize that dictator, Castro

They would have been screaming about the invasion of South Vietnam in 1975 where the north started a genocide campaign in direct violation of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and caused over 2 million Vietnamese to flee in little boats that got picked up by ships like mine in 1981

They would be screaming at the Palestinians for their suicide bombings that intentionally target innocent school age children,

They would be screaming at the Palestinians for their suicide bombings that intentionally target innocent people on buses, or pizza parlors, or weddings, or cruise ships, or Olympic hotels,

Except, the only time they scream is when the US is at war against a tyrant who is support by Russia.

In much of the world, the antics and policies of these PEACE NAZIS would result in jail – or worse. Cuba, China and many socialist countries routinely eliminate protests – and protesters – against the government and its leaders. It seems ironic that the ultimate goal of these protesters is to transform America into the kind of government that tolerates no dissent.


And since NAZI is one of the most vile insults you can give someone in our last two generations, I call them PEACE NAZIS, for they are not for peace, they are for war, they are for the overthrow of my country and into communism and anarchy, and they are a violent bunch who base their foundation on lies and the telling of lies and the repeating of lies.

[Red Phillips]

I appreciate the passion of your post, but I think you are profoundly misunderstanding what I and the rest of the antiwar RIGHT is saying. The antiwar left is made up of many of the unsavory elements you mention. Pacifist, America haters, communist sympathizers, and to them big capitalistic America is always the bad guy. The antiwar right, is simply non intervention. Not pro commie by any means and by and large not pacifistic. What you might call isolationist, a term I embrace but some think is a term of derision. Your list of atrocities is a good one but it illustrates the point. The world is too big, man's nature is too fallen, there are too many bad things happening in the world for us to hope to play global policeman. Opposing American intervention is not the same as endorsing an atrocity. But it is a very conservative instinct to recognize the limits of government to remake fallen man. Only Christ can remake fallen man. Of all those atrocities you mentioned, which ones would you intervene in? With what troops? With what money?

[RaceBannon]

I would have intervened in almost everyone, with either an embargo or troops of our own or the support of troops indigenous to fight the bad guys.

The PEACE NAZIS dont believe in any of that. Unless it is a war against American Interests.

[AFPhys]

PEACE NAZIS

I like it - I LOVE YOUR Statement of what they are, and I will be copying it for distribution to some of my unfriends here.

Red: you're wrong about being isolationist and non-interventionist. We have no moral choice but to be the best global policeman possible. That clearly does not mean we can or must intervene in each and every case of injustice, but that we must constantly evaluate where and when, much as a good parent chooses when and how to intervene in the lives of their children for their own benefit, but often chooses to let them go their own way for one reason or another.

In the case of Saddumb Hussein, OBL and Afghanistan, we waited far too long for the rest of the world to respond, as we have also in the case of Iran, and Syrian support of terrorism, and I'm quite tempted to say we've waited too long in the case of Saudi Arabia, but I don't know enough about the "behind the scenes" activity there to be certain. Being isolationist and non-interventionist and allowing threats to overcome our allies, and eventually ourselves, is not an effective option for a world superpower, and it is not moral to stand by and do nothing. If anything, I would state that we have errored most grieveously by being as non-interventionist as we have been to our detriment and to the world's, and would contend that we ought to have intervened in the majority of the cases RaceB mentioned in his post.

[NHResident]

I think Murray Rothbard was one conflicted dude. I never finished his biography - I couldn't get past teh statement by one of his 'true believers' that Rothbard was only 'consistent in his inconsistency' i.e. he challenged his followers with a firm philosophy - then as his followers began to understand his rational and began to embrace it, Rothbard would 'move beyond' that understanding and embrace the exact opposite! It sounded to me like someone who had a lot of fun playing 'mind-games' on people who were intellectually slower than him. I wasn't interested.

[Iris7]

In the past I was very much in your philosophical camp. Loved Patrick Henry even as a young boy, read Chronicles religiously and contributed money to them as I could. I know Chis Check pretty well, and have talked to Tom Flemming for some hours. Enjoyed Lew Rockwell.

The problem is that humans do not behave that way. Those that find Liberty worth the sacrifice are a minority. People will not defend the Constitution, as Alexander Hamilton predicted.

Any more I see the whole enterprise of the Republic as another well fitted piece in the mosaic of human events, a first half of the 18th Century Whiggishness. Been doomed since "judicial review" or even earlier with Charles River Bridge and the end of the "abridgment of contracts" clause.

[Red Phillips]

Well at least you guys are honest. Admitting you want to be global policemen and intervene almost everywhere. That is fine, but it is not conservative. It is certainly not small government conservative. It is Wilsonian liberalism. That kind of policy would require a huge military with huge military budgets and the loss of many lives. It would also make it nearly impossible for Americans to step outside our country without being a target. The rest of the world doesn't like us because they see us as trying to throw our weight around. It we were in all the places you want, then we would be even more despised. I don't doubt your motives, but the rest of the world would surely doubt ours. Don't you think all those countries you consider our "children" would balk at that characterizations and resent our acting as their "parent." It is not anti-American to think that that kind of attitude is patronizing and dangerous. Would you be OK with it if Canada decided it was our "parent" and that it was in our best interest to adopt universal health care? And it was their "moral obligation" to impose that on us by force of arms. Of course you would be outraged and rightly so. And don't respond by saying yeah but America can do it and Canada can't. That would be saying that might makes right, and I'm sure that is not what you are saying.

[Lazamataz]

[At least you are] admitting you want to be global policemen and intervene almost everywhere.

Me too.

[Red Phillips]

Rothbard was always consistent with his own philosophy. Where he changed was with who he thought anarchist libertarians like himself should make allies. He initially started out believing his natural allies were on the "Old Right" right. When Buckley hijacked the right with his attempts to purge anyone who wasn't a die hard Cold Warrior, Rothbard decided his allies were in the antiwar left, who also didn't like drug laws, antiporn laws, etc. Toward the end of his life he had returned to his alliance with the isolationist right. He endorsed Buchanan in '92. Rothbard was a nonpracticing Jew. While he was never as antireligion as some left libertarians, toward the end of his life he started to recognize that religion and tradition was ultimately protective of liberty but of course he never endorsed any government measures to enforce them.

[Destro]

Bravo. For the record - for the Iraq war but hate how it was fought and feel nation changing is folly.

Not I wrote nation changing - nation building would involve building up what was there before such as a republican Germany and Japan before the Nazis and Jap Generals.

Nation changing involves importing and creating new institutions and ways of thinking into nations that have never known such things such as Iraq.

Example: Maybe Iraq would have been better off as a strong man centralized constitutional monarchy like they had before Saddam and not the system put into place now?

[AFPhys]

The mere fact that we ARE the ultrapower - the greatest and most unchallenged military and economic power the world has ever known - makes us a target whether you like it or not, and no matter what we do. Like it or not, the success of our Constitution and our way of life has brought us inevitably to this place, and we are the leaders of the world culturally, economically, and militarily. To deny our responsibility is as laughable as the pro athletes denial that they must properly act as role models for our youth. To change that, we would have to do as the French and Russians and Germans and Koffees want and surrender our sovereignty and lower our economic standards.

Surrender of our sovereignty would most decidedly not be in keeping with the standards the Constitution sketches out for us.

In fact, it is very Conservative to insist that our government be used to PROVIDE FOR THE NATIONAL DEFENSE - and in the Twentieth Century, when failure to maintain a standing army and use it in time arguably led to far more destructive wars and cost to this country due to YOUR type of shortsighted "conservative" isolationism added to the Peace Nazis efforts - and as well that gave rise to a far more destructive Cold War and Soviet influence than would have been the case had we more energetically opposed them. Similarly, it is shortsighted to recognize that PREEMPTIVE use of military power and economic power and other national assets is critical in the present world environment, and that it is necessary to PROVIDE FOR THE COMMMON DEFENSE, as the clear failure to act preemptively against Afghanistan and earlier, Iraq, cost us dearly.

I highly recommend that you look up President Bush's Jun.1.2002 Graduation Speech at West Point http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html and the "National Security Strategy of the United States": http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html for a more farsighted view of the global situation and how we must act in order to counter the threats to our National Defense.

[Destro]

PROVIDE FOR THE COMMMON DEFENSE, does not translate into provide for the common offense unless you adopt the left wing view of a living constitution that can change meaning along with the times and want to change meanings of words ala Orwell's 1984.

While not a paleo or a Libertarian, I can understand why the new conservativcs set the other side of the right off.

[AFPhys]

I strongly disagree - and it is not tampering with the original meaning of the Constitution - in the modern world we must not make the error of believing that we can defend ourselves solely by awaiting the enemy with muskets in Concord and Lexington; and though some would, most of the Founding Fathers would not make a case for that position.

The only way that our government can responsibly provide for the common defense is to keep enemies away from our shores.

[Destro]

and it is not tampering with the original meaning of the Constitution - in the modern world we must not make the error

Not so fast - in the modern world we must not make the mistake that the constitution has a different meaning or application in the modern world than what the constitution meant in the past.

[Destro]

The only way that our government can responsibly provide for the common defense is to keep enemies away from our shores.

I am sure the paleo answer to that is: "why station the military in Iraq and leave the Mexican border wide open?"