Tag: war

The War Party

One of the reasons I’m burned out on the two major parties is that, to a disgusting extent, they are one party, The War Party. That party’s going to be the death of this nation, as giddy, thoughtless, hubristic wars make us odious in the eyes of the world and eventually bankrupt us.

This is not conservatism. This is not Christian. This sure as hell is not “Christian conservatism.” No amount of drum-beating about Radical Islamic Terrorist Hoards can make it so.

The best conservative response to terrorism, it seems to me, is what I first heard from Pat Buchanan: If there’s no solution, there’s no problem.

Terrorism is an evil, not a problem. We will not eradicate it (Hatfield probably said something like Bush’s second inaugural before he set out to end McCoy terrorism – or was it McCoy ending Hatfield terrorism?), and I personally – call me silly – don’t didn’t want to give up the Republic trying to eradicate it.

And while my individual position may shade into “isolationism” (due to personality quirks and a history of conscientious objection and borderline pacifism), the historic Christian conservative mainstream position is not isolationist.

That’s all I need to say to introduce and commend to you a great current piece by Winston Elliott III at The Imaginative Conservative. The author is appreciably more hawkish than I am, despite his having a son in the Army, but far less adventurist, interventionist and lunatic than either Dubya or Obama or anyone who’s taken seriously for President next year (Ron Paul, the favorite of active military people, not being taken seriously).

Excerpts:

Every conservative concerned about American foreign policy should read Foreign Policy for Conservatives on this site. This brilliant description of a conservative foreign policy is excerpted from Russell Kirk’s book The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft …

Those who wish to use the American military to effect regime change in foreign lands are sensitive to terms like “war party.” They say this is an exaggeration of their position. Poppycock. Let’s go ahead and add “interventionist” and “lover of foreign adventure” for good measure. They do not like it because it accurately describes their approach to using the military might of the American Republic. They are open to spending American blood and treasure whenever they feel that people in a foreign country are “oppressed” or their leader is a “tyrant” or “dictator.”…Before they start calling me an “isolationist” again let me state my position clearly (as I have before on this site). I don’t believe in “isolationism.” However, I do believe that prudence demands we count the costs of our actions, especially so that we learn from the past and may make better decisions in the future. Certainly 6,000 U.S. dead, 33,000 wounded, and $1.3 trillion is a very high cost indeed. 
Is it not legitimate to ask was it worth it?…Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, and other notable conservatives, have expressed great concern that centralization and militarization have been the greatest threats to preservation of the principles of the American Republic. They were not isolationists. They were true patriots who wished to guard against taking actions to destroy the enemy that may simultaneously lead to undermining the ordered liberty we claim to fight to preserve.I am for taking military action against those that clear evidence indicates threaten the safety of our Republic and its citizens. But, does this necessitate a permanent military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about Germany, South Korea and Japan? Is there no end to this? If not, I fear that we must (as Brad Birzer has suggested on this site) admit that the Republic is lost and that we fight to defend a democratic empire … 

My policy … is simple: I say kill the enemy and come home. Don’t move into his house and call it defense….

I will say this again. When the real interests of Americans are threatened then to use military force is permitted. Kill those who plan to kill us. Destroy their bases. When necessary, go back and do it again. That is prudent application of military force against the enemy. It is not pacifism or isolationism. 

Don’t occupy foreign nations for decades, longer than WWI and WWII combined. This is foolishness. And it is not conservative.

…

All I ask for, beg for, is a prudent use of our military. Never one drop of blood for an American empire. Kill our enemies, destroy their bases and bring our boys home. I believe it is conservative to choose protecting American lives over a goal of changing the culture and politics of foreign nations.

Foreign Policy for Conservatives is itself a collection of excerpts, but I’ll be so bold as to pull one of them:

The statesman not concerned primarily with the national interest is tossed about by every wind of doctrine; he pursues with imprudent passion vague ideological objectives, and soon finds himself mired in diplomatic and military quicksands….

Finally, one more personal observation. I alluded to my conscientious objection which, if you know me, you’ll know was Vietnam era, shortly before the abolition of the loathed military draft. But I fear that the abolition of the draft, replaced by a “volunteer army,” has deprived our ruling class from having any flesh, blood or skin in the game of military adventurism. How many of our bellicose GOP hopefuls have a child in uniform? How many served themselves? Do you think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that the Obama girls will go into the Army from Sidwell Friends School, rather than to University of Chicago, Stanford or one of the Ivy League schools?

No, I’m afraid that to our rulers, the flesh and blood of soldiers is just a “human resource,” to be squandered as freely as monetary resources.

We now return to lamestream programming. Look! Kim Kardashian! Chaz Bono! American Idol! Shiny! (HT Mark Shea)

* * * * *

View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right, or subscribe on Twitter.

Standing advice on enduring themes.

Tasty Tidbits 8/13/11 – Curmudgeon Special

  1. Anathema (Corporatism I)
  2. Can you top this I?
  3. A golden anniversary
  4. Catholicism/Americanism mish-mash.
  5. Rick Perry’s Crony Capitalism Problem.
  6. Can you top this II?
  7. Food police (Corporatism II).
  8. Corporatism III
  9. A Feast of the Mother of God.

(I seem to detect an antiwar, anticorporate selection bias here. Imagine that!)

Continue reading “Tasty Tidbits 8/13/11 – Curmudgeon Special” →

Long wars and democracy

“Long wars are antithetical to democracy.” So opens a Washington Post op-ed column by Andrew J. Bacevich. “Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.”

General McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview ranks right down there with Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview in the annals of stupid decisions by public people who should have known better. He couldn’t keep them from profiling him, but he didn’t have to sit down for an interview, accompanied by  Aides full of adolescent smartassness. For his lapse in judgment, we’d owe him a great debt of gratitude — if only it would cause us to abandon the aspiration to empire.

The problem, Bacevich suggests, goes back to the abandonment of a “citizen army” (i.e., the draft) in favor of a standing army of careerists, led by outstanding high officers but (and here Bacevich barely hints — I think he understands it, but it was beyond his scope) staffed by cannon fodder — young men and women appreciably poorer and darker-skinned than the sorts of people who by and large run the government and those institutions that might hold government accountable. Men and women who, we can tell ourselves, knew what they were getting into.

The big fib of the week?

“Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” [Barak Obama] In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

In the all-volunteer Army, the military-industrial complex has found its perfect instrument. There’s no need for a frank military coup; we already have a covert military-industrial coup.

I’m no fan of conspiracy theories. No doubt there are connivers in the world, but I believe much less in the efficacy of conspiracy than of tragedy: the inexorable outworking of fatal flaws in a generally admirable protagonist; or metaphorically, the eventual expression of a fatal “genetic” flaw in every single regime in our world-gone-mutant.

Americans might do well to contemplate a famous warning issued by another frustrated commander from a much earlier age.

“We had been told, on leaving our native soil,” wrote the centurion Marcus Flavius to a cousin back in Rome, “that we were going to defend the sacred rights conferred on us by so many of our citizens [and to aid] populations in need of our assistance and our civilization.” For such a cause, he and his comrades had willingly offered to “shed our quota of blood, to sacrifice our youth and our hopes.” Yet the news from the homeland was disconcerting: The capital was seemingly rife with factions, treachery and petty politics. “Make haste,” Marcus Flavius continued, “and tell me that our fellow citizens understand us, support us and protect us as we ourselves are protecting the glory of the empire.”

“If it should be otherwise, if we should have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain, then beware of the anger of the legions!”

(Emphasis added) Thank you, Professor Bacevich. If we manage to disenthrall ourselves long enough to notice when our greatness is all gone, we won’t be able to say nobody told us.

And thank you, Washington Post. This is the kind of real conservativism that the idjits at TownHall.com will never publicize. (They’re saying things like we should “fire Obama” — as if that would solve the problem.)