Exit Strategies

One of the charges Auster likes to level at paleocons is “anti-Americanism,” usually when he’s talking about our foreign policy views.  He believes that the term describes The  American Conservative, Antiwar.com, and me.

He needs to define the term.  On domestic policy, Auster would probably agree that the federal government is an anti-white and feminist tyranny.  Its goals are redistributing wealth from whites to blacks, rearranging natural sex roles, demographically transforming the nation and robbing it of its wealth.  An American patriot should oppose his government, the way a Russian patriot might have opposed the Soviet Union or an Iraqi patriot Saddam Hussein.

Where most of us differ with Auster is that he believes that once it’s away from the homeland, the American government magically transforms into a defender of the country.  When dealing with Mexican invaders or parasitical blacks the political class believes in using the tax payer as a cash cow they extort to buy votes, power and self-righteousness.  In their relations with foreign governments and organizations, all of a sudden the exact same people who are actively working to destroy the historical American nation are defenders of the West!

Why do some who agree that the ruling class is decadent and evil, line up behind those they berate in the area of foreign policy?  We are to believe that the very same government that continues to let Muslims into the country every single day is defending us from Islam when its representatives are in the deserts of Iraq.  The neocons are at least consistent in foreign affairs since they accept the welfare state and the counter-culture of the 1960s; the US government, which institutionalized these things, isn’t the enemy to them.  It is for us.

Instead of believing that the government manages to be benevolent and wise only in foreign affairs, we should be able to see that it does the exact same things abroad that it does at home.  It borrows from the Chinese and taxes the American citizen so it can push the ideals of the New Left and favor certain ethnies (blacks and Hispanics at home; Bosnians, Jews, Kurds, Georgians and Tajiks abroad) while oppressing others (whites at home; Arabs, Russians, Pashtuns, Persians, and Serbs abroad). A cultural Marxist doesn’t become a conservative when he’s commanding an army.

Auster needs to tell us what he means by “anti-Americanism” before he flings the term around.  Today the ruling ideology is multiculturalism.  But if anyone can be an American, no one is.  And if the term “American” is meaningless, “anti-American” is too.  How can a people that doesn’t even exist have enemies to fight?

Perhaps we can define Americanism as loyalty to the ideas of limited government and free markets plus reverence for the ethnic group that founded the country.  In that case, I’m more pro-American than Auster will ever be.  Still, it makes no sense to approve of Washington’s adventurism as it does nothing to reduce the size of government or defend the interests of the historic American nation.  Once again, the wars we’ve seen are exactly what you’d expect from the same people who gave us affirmative action, disparate impact laws, school busing and race replacement immigration.

The U.S. appears to be gearing up for it...

Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel this week turned out to be a major diplomatic flop for the White House. The Obama administration was hoping to renew peace negotiations between the Jewish state and Mahmoud Abbas’ West Bank Palestinians, but ended up in a rather embarrassing position.

In the middle of Biden’s stay, the Israeli Interior Ministry gave the stamp of approval for new settlements in East Jerusalem, an act that torpedoed the White House reconciliation initiative. Over the course of two decades, the talks have never gone anywhere anyway, but that is not the point.

Biden’s trip was touted as a US-Israel love fest. He went out of his way to remind the press that alignment with Tel Aviv "has been and will continue to be the centerpiece of American policy." Appearing upon arrival with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Biden also remarked on how it was "good to be home." And we thought the man was from Scranton! Yet the Vice President didn’t get anything in return for all this obsequious behavior. Rather, the Israeli government undermined his agenda in a very public fashion by giving the green light to further settlements.

The American public (along with the world) doesn't seem to care about last weekend's elections in Iraq. One doesn't even hear much about this March of Freedom from Dubya's greatest admirers within the conservative movement. Michelle Malkin, for instance, hasn't written a column on the subject. Only the center-left is talking up the election -- and it all seems forced, if not sarcastic: "Victory At Last!"; "Iraq's newborn democracy is a juggernaught that will not be stopped." Really?     

A lot of this unconcern is due to the fact that everyone's focused on the economy, healthcare, and Obama. But I think the main reason for it is that the display last weekend was profoundly embarrassing. There were over 6000 candidates "from all of the country's major sects and many different parties," according to Newsweek. And the election represented, even more baldly than here in America, an "advance sale on stolen goods." Jobs, handouts, a more equitable distribution of the fabled Iraqi dish  al-qawza were promised (though, in truth, that latter one was satire.) Even the one-time neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi took part: after getting his use from Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, he's now teamed up with anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr! Does anyone out there really want to stand up and exclaim, "Boys, this is what we've been fighting and dying for!"

We hear regularly from officialdom that US forces are engaged in pacifying Afghanistan and spreading the gospel of the open society to prevent another terrorist strike along the lines of 9/11. This explanation can't even pass the laugh test, given that the September 11th attacks were planned and coordinated by jihadists in perfect models of open society such as Hamburg, Germany.

While the ideological sincerity of US policymakers and think-tankers is not in doubt (they really do want to bomb the Hindu Kush into the Brave New World), there are other factors that loom just as large. Afghanistan has provided the US a continuous presence in Central Asia over the past decade, and Washington has no plans for departure. The country’s proximity to the oil and natural gas of the Caspian basin is just too alluring, as is the possibility of undermining both Russia and China. At stake is control of Eurasia and the East-West energy corridors that compose the New Silk Road.

Richard Holbrooke, State’s Special Representative for “AfPak”, recently wrapped up a tour that spanned Central Asia and the Caucasus. Long a key architect of US interventions in Eurasia, Holbrooke was making his way across the region’s capitals looking for support in Afghanistan. The Central Asians were quite cautious in their dealings with Holbrooke, given that the Kremlin controls the main northern route for US/NATO supplies into Afghanistan. Georgia, though, was another story.

23 percent of the US federal budget goes towards defense, 20 percent towards social security and 19 percent towards medicare.  The programs providing support for the elderly are to a large extent people getting the money they paid into the system back.  Military spending, on the other hand, is wasted on machinery that either kills innocent people or rots in a warehouse.  The biggest government waste program is defense and the biggest welfare cases in America are the US army and its contractors.

A true conservative movement should take on the military industrial complex before it worries about unwed mothers or ending social security.