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.

[Red Phillips]

Man you have bought the neocon line totally. I agree our size and influence make us a target regardless. But we are more of a target because we intervene. As I have said before on this board, no terrorist are attacking Switzerland. And absolutely nothing I have said would fairly lead you to accuse me of wanting to sacrifice our sovereignty. I think we should get out of the UN and NATO and other multilateral organizations that sacrifice our sovereignty. I also have not, unlike some paleos, embraced the more dovish or realistic Colin Powell, because I realized his position was not motivated by principled isolationism but by multilateralism. I and most antiwar paleos and libertarians are the ultimate unilateralist. We should never have to seek anyone else's permission to protect ourselves. But providing for the common defense means protecting our northern border from Canada, our southern border from Mexico and Florida from Cuba and not much else. It does not include toppling foreign dictators halfway around the world just because we do not like them. If Saddam was blockading the Persian Gulf demanding we pay tribute to him on every barrel of oil that passed through, I would send in the 5th fleet. If Saddam is a ruthless dictator, it is the responsibility of the Iraqis and the Iraqis only to overthrow him. It is not America's responsibility and it is certainly not the responsibility of the poor Army grunt who is over there carrying water for all the keyboard warriors at National Review and the Weekly Standard. I am very familiar with the National Security Strategy for The United States. It could not be much worse if it was written by Satan himself. It is a strategy for perpetual unwinable war, and it has neocon fingerprints all over it.

The idea of preemptive war is dangerous in the extreme. Especially for the citizens in the country we supposedly have some crystal ball and are supposed to realize they represent some sort of threat. It also violates the Christian principle of a just war. You can not make absolute assertions that this or that would have been better if only we had intervened sooner because it is absolutely unfalsifiable. There is a significant case to be made for example that had we stayed out of WWI there would have been no WWII. If we had stayed out of WWII there would have been no Cold War as the Germans and Russians would have fought each other into the ground. The Russians were our allies in WWII remember. Do you think we should have been fighting a "preemptive" two front war then? Against the Germans and Russians. Those Russians were bad fellows and maybe we could have prevented the Cold War had we just stomped them sooner, right. You are living in neocon fantasy land.

If we are recommending readings for each other, may I recommend you read Washington's Farewell Address? I'll take the wisdom of the founders over wisdom from the neocons any day of the week.

BTW, did you get my private reply?

[blackeagle]

bump

[Lurking Libertarian]

And all they did was invent the kookoo clock.

Harry Lime, is that you?

[rmlew]

Auster is a Nationalist, not a regionalist NeoConfederate. He has issues with both neocons and paleocons.
FrontPage magazine is for immigration reform and has run articles questioning free trade.

[rmlew]

The Constitution did a pretty good job for the first 110 years. The Articles of Confederation broke down in under 10.

[meema]

bttt!

[Red Phillips]

Well I have to give you credit like I did our two neocon globocops above, at least you are honest. I said I wanted to establish a baseline, and I have. You are a Social Democrat who has deluded himself into believing you are a conservative. You and David Brooks and the rest of the boys can believe in all the big government you want, just please do the rest of us a favor, and preserve the integrity of the English language, and don't call yourself a conservative.

Where exactly in the Constitution is Social Security, Medicare, and the DOE authorized? And please don't whip out the General Welfare Clause or the Interstate Commerce Clause. Your fellow traveling liberal buddies have already beat those poor sections to death.

The problem with the Articles of Confederation that the delegates were sent there to deal with were the debasing of the currency and interstate trade restrictions. (They were not sent there initially to create a whole new Constitution.) Those things could have been dealt with without creating a federal government that has grown out of control. In fact, that whole protecting us against a debased currency and insisting on gold and silver coinage is working great isn't it? Score one for the Anti-Federalist.

America has a great standard of living in spite of our big, meddlesome, nanny state, not because of it. How much more prosperous would we be if we only paid a couple of percent in taxes and were free from burdensome federal regulation?

And since Switzerland hasn't been attacked yet, maybe they should launch one of those preemptive wars. Since you are a prophet, maybe you could tell them who they should attack.

[Red Phillips]

I should have pinged you on the reply above. See above re. the Articles of Confederation.

Re. Front Page Mag. I gave them some credit. But if they are on the wrong side of the right to secede question they are on the wrong side of my real conservative vs. fake conservative dichotomy that I explained above. Secession is a right and the ultimate and most important check and balance. It is not sedition if that is what your tag line is implying. Although statist everywhere would agree with your tag line. Don't want none of those pesky secessionist messing with their power.

[AFPhys]

I have no idea what you or anybody else means by the term "neocon", and don't care a whit. I am a Conservative dead center in the mold of Ronald Reagan. That same father of the ultrapower United States brought on our present era of prosperity by defeating the Soviet Union - engaging in total and preemptive war against them, and won the world for the United States without firing a shot. You wish to throw all that away - No Thanks. That great Conservative also engaged in a preemptive strike against Grenada consistent with the Monroe Doctrine, assistance to the Afghan rebels that drained the Soviets, assistance to the Contras, and many other military and pseudomilitary activities that gave us the dominance we enjoy today. It made the world so much safer that people like you joined with the leftists to drastically degrade the military in the 90s. Aside: Why didn't you join with your buddies then to protect the borders? That dominance has started many nations down the inevitable road to greater freedom and liberty - the only moral manner in which the greatest Christian nation on earth could properly pursue.

You don't like that RR and I am a Conservative? Tough. We're not the first who believed your isolationist tendencies are the wrong course - and after the foolish experiment with isolationism in the 30s I would think that everyone would have learned. Arguably the most successful foreign policy document ever in the world's history was the Monroe Doctrine, and it is decidedly not isolationist, and espouses activist stances and preemption explicitly. President Bush's "Liberty Doctrine", that you clearly do not understand, updates the Monroe Doctrine for the modern world circumstances. It is the only way that we will be able to keep the jackals from destroying Civilization in the long run.

You want to bank on "border security" and police actions when the bad guys attack us - disappear from the world scene except when we decide to implicitly rubber stamp some stupid UN or other foolish socialist proposal? You want to be a Clintonite and respond to attacks on embassies and even the Trade Center by turning our heads or asking France to arrest the perpetrators? Those are losing propositions in this world - indistinguishable from the position of the Peace Nazis on the whacko far left wing - and you willingly embrace such leftist concepts and call yourself "conservative"? It is also a completely immoral way to behave, for to whom much has been given, much is expected, and we have been given much. You want to be an ostrich and hide your head from the world - go ahead for yourself - but this country does not have such a comfortable option. Whether YOU like it or not, the dictators and madmen and OBL's will continue to spin their webs, and the only - ONLY - way to ultimately keep them from attacking us is to engage them now, while they are weaker and more disorganized than they would be after you allowed them increasingly powerful bases and terrorist nations to operate from, and increasingly powerful technology to use in their attacks.

The NSS I referenced in post#36, and that encouragement of Liberty for the people of the world against oppressive regimes, is the only way I have yet heard that offers any hope of avoiding the type of world that you are espousing: the world of the US as an increasingly isolated "walled" commmunity. Your way is wrong for me and my children, it is wrong for the United States, and it is wrong for the world.

[Red Phillips]

Simmer down. No need to get emotional. Just trying to have a rational debate.

You hit on one of the major problems. For most "mainstream" "movement" conservatives, their historical memory does not extend past Reagan. Reagan was a conservative by the standards of his day, but he was no conservative by the standards of the Constitution. There was not one Democratic spending bill that he should not have vetoed until he ran out of ink. He also appointed pro-choice Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. An abomination. No one who doesn't want to get rid of ALL unauthorized, unconstitutional spending is a real conservative by any fixed standard such as the Constitution.

Also, historically the "Old Right" was always isolationist. It was conservatives who opposed our war against Spain, our entry into WWI and our entry into WWII. It was during the Cold War that anticommunism became the sine qua non of official conservatism and it's spokesmen such as Buckley. But libertarians and some of the more hard right conservative groups remained isolationist. (The John Birch Society opposed our entry into Vietnam for example, and you can not possibly say they were soft on Communism.) I do not endorse interventionism during the Cold War, but once the Soviet Union fell why didn't conservatism return to it's isolationist roots?

If you are a conservative "dead center in the mold of RR," I am a conservative dead center in the mold of Patrick Henry.

You want us to be the "encouragement of Liberty for the people of the world against repressive regimes." Talk about echoing the left. What are you now a "citizen of the world?" I am a citizen of the US, not the world, and the Constitution was designed to protect the Liberty of Americans, not the world.

You may believe that the NSS is the best hope for your children, but it is a monumental fools errand. We can no more end evil in the world than we can lasso the moon. It is a strategy for perpetual war and never ending hatred of the US.

[AFPhys]

An isolationist and idealist like yourself could not be elected, and could never govern if they lied their way into office. RR's way is the only possibility to reverse the damage that the socialists and isolationists did to the US during the 30s-60s. Unlike you, and the other idealists I know who could never gain power and therefore will be perpetual gnats instead of persons who will have any effect on policy, Reagan and other conservatives like me have managed to have an effect. Your way failed miserably before RR, and will continue to fail now. I DO remember the ineffectiveness of "conservatives" like yourself, and do not absolve them of their responsibility for getting us the great deal of the Thirties socialist programs by joining forces with the leftists.

Like it or not, the socialists imposed the great "deal" on this country and the associated welfare programs. I would LOVE to get rid of federal government meddling in much of what it has taken upon itself, and so did Reagan, but only so much was able to be done at a time. Weaning American of those "great deals" will take at least the same amount of time, and will take even longer if the gnats like yourself continue to join forces with the socialists in opposition to honest conservatives' efforts to continue to reverse it while maintaining the voting power to make a difference, and educating people as to why it is a better way. You see, I believe in PROMOTING the general welfare, not providing it, in agreement with you - but in a representative government such as ours, it is not possible to force American to do that "cold turkey".

Likewise, I believe the founders were right about PROVIDING for the common defense of this nation, and whether you like it or not, the alternative in the world of TODAY means that such provision must recognize that if we simply ignore what is going on outside our borders, this country will cease to exist. You, like the Peace Nazis, have a fantasy of a world filled with perfect people leading perfect nations, but that is simply foolish, yet at least you concede that a few nasties will try to get past our borders or corrupt trading practices so we need an isolationist wall. A walled "Castle America" is not viable and such a state that you have projected to us in this thread would be destroyed by a terrorist-led dictatorial state within three decades.

It is nice you finally recognize such views as yours make you a member of "libertarians and some of the more hard right conservative groups" instead of being a mainline conservative, such as myself. If those groups had gotten their wish and stayed out of, for example, WWII, Hitler or the Soviet Commies would have become the undisputed atomic powers and within a dozen years after that would have imposed themselves upon the rest of the world, including a USA defenseless against such weaponry. Your vaunted isolationist tendencies would have resulted in failure to PROVIDE FOR THE NATIONAL DEFENSE. Fine - be there with the rest of them - but you end up being extremely counterproductive in advancing to your own views when it comes to legislative effect.

Your joining forces with the Peace Nazis in this case, as well as socialists in the other case, make you no different from the left as far as being an asset to Conservative government, no matter your "good intentions".

"Citizen of the world" - rubbish. "End evil in the world" - balderdash. You claim know the NSS and the Liberty Doctrine, but you utterly fail to comprehend the reasoning behind it, and if you did you would realize that the NSS is based on no such preconceptions, nor is my argument. Just like a Utopian socialist, you can't seem to think past an immediate result. You can't seem to come to grips with the recognition that the promotion of Liberty for others will result in increased security and prosperity for ourselves, and, indeed, increased Liberty for Americans here at home and abroad. You apparently believe that the NSS states that the US will run the world, dictate to it, determine their governments or in some other way create an empire USA. If you were to actually THINK about the NSS and the present world situation rather than some socialist, idealist fantasy of the way the world "should" be, you would realize that it is the only hope of AVOIDING perpetual war, not be a cause of it. Perhaps you ought to review it again, assuming you have actually looked at it, against all discernible evidence.

Patrick Henry would most certainly approve such a strategy in today's world.

[Red Phillips]

You are definitely right about one thing, since my conversion to real conservatism during my College Republican days, I have never, ever claimed to be a "mainline" or "main-steam" conservative. Main-steam conservatives are just as much of the problem as liberals of which they are a subspecies. In fact, they are probably more of a problem because they convince the masses that they really are conservative and they ostracize the real conservatives. Your anger is misdirected. You should not be angry at me for staying true to principle. You should be angry at those who sell out principle and call it conservatism.

I have said before that honest conservatives can disagree about the rate of change, but they can not disagree about the direction. Example: Medicare is clearly unconstitutional, an immoral wealth transfer scheme, and should be abolished. Conservatives could support abolishing it today, fazing it out at a fixed 10% over the next 10 years until it is down to zero, or by a fixed 5% over the next 20 for you moderates. But they CAN NOT support slowing its rate of growth because that is still in the wrong direction. At that point you are just arguing with the Social Democrats about degrees of Social Democracy. Social Democracy is NEVER conservatism.

I'm sorry if my injection of a little ideological reality messes up the nice little schema you have been brainwashed by the Republicans and the "conservative establishment" into accepting. Republicans good. Democrats bad. Republicans conservative. Democrats liberal. Well wake up buddy. The reality is this. Democrats = Social Democrats. Republicans = slightly less Social Democrat. And Rush and the rest of them can blather all they want, that is the Gospel Truth.

Don't be mad at me. Be mad at those who have lied to you. And come on over from the dark side and join us in actually trying to make some conservative change.

I'm the one joining forces with the leftist. Yeah right! What you are espousing is leftism.

On foreign policy, I am the realist and you are the Utopian idealist. Things are the way they are because of innumerable factors. Religion, culture, race, language, history, ancient jealousies, tribal conflicts, etc. etc. etc. To believe you can just uproot American style democracy and transplant it anywhere in the world, and they are all just going to welcome us with open arms and say, "Gee, thanks for liberating us" is Utopian in the extreme. It is much more likely to make the world angry at us and instead of decreasing the threat, it increases it.

P.S. Calling me a gnat was not very nice.

[rmlew]

The problem with the Articles of Confederation that the delegates were sent there to deal with were the debasing of the currency and interstate trade restrictions. (They were not sent there initially to create a whole new Constitution.) Those things could have been dealt with without creating a federal government that has grown out of control. In fact, that whole protecting us against a debased currency and insisting on gold and silver coinage is working great isn't it? Score one for the Anti-Federalist.
It took 130 years to get out of control. That is not a bad record. The Fedral Reserve Bank was not created until 1913.
The Articles of Confederation were spinning out of control in 10 years. Score 0 for the anti-Federalists.

America has a great standard of living in spite of our big, meddlesome, nanny state, not because of it. How much more prosperous would we be if we only paid a couple of percent in taxes and were free from burdensome federal regulation?
Again, this is a recent phenonimon. Moreover, we are also wealthy because the country grew, had resources, could protect itself, and followed Hamilton's economic advice.

And since Switzerland hasn't been attacked yet, maybe they should launch one of those preemptive wars.
Huh?

[rmlew]

1. Secession is a tool, not a panacea. There can be no stable republic if sections are threatening to or are seceding. Demagogues and revoltions are common results of secession. Anarchy and weakness also invite foreign intervention.
2. Where secession passed in a Constitutional manner, I would have far less problem with it. However, we had a bunch of State Governments pursue unConstitutional courses of action leading to insurection and rebellion. Supporting said insurrection is sedition.

[Red Phillips]

The Constitution had fallen apart by four scour and seven years. The time when a crazed, war mongering, blood thirsty, Constitution shredding dictator decided to invade a Country that had peacefully and lawfully seceded.

What in the Constitution prohibits secession? Nothing. Therefore it is Constitutional. Although I agree that a section specifically authorizing secession, while unnecessary, should have been included in the Constitution to erase any doubt. That it wasn't was one more reason to stick with the AoC.

Hamilton favored an unconstitutional Central Bank. While he was a decent and well intentioned man, we should have ignored his merchantilistic economic advice.

[Red Phillips]

So you were going to whip out the general welfare clause? If so, I rest my case.

Let me try to illustrate by way of example. Communist believe in the common ownership of the means of production. If you say you are a Communist, but you do not believe in the common ownership of the means of production, instead you just believe in heavy government regulation of the private economy, then you really are not a Communist. You can jump up and down and stamp your feet and insist over and over you are a Communist, but if you don't believe certain threshold principles you are not. Same thing goes for real conservatism. If you believe the right of the government to redistribute wealth in welfare schemes is somehow enshrined in the general welfare clause, then you are not a real conservative. And no amount of protesting or screaming or questioning how educated I am will change that.

Orwell said that freedom is the right to say 2+2=4. (Paraphrase.) Well 2+2=4. And Social Democracy = Social Democracy. 2+2 does not equal 5 and Social Democracy does not and will never equal conservatism, and no amount of brainwashing by the "mainstream conservative" establishment will ever change that.

And how can you say us hard core folks think we own the place. We are the minority here. And the mainstreamers are the ones always calling us names and making fun and questioning people's education, etc. etc. etc. I never call names, and I am always polite. I just point out inconvenient little ideological facts.