Buchanan, "Whose War?"

hmmmm comments from any side (libs, neocons, independents, centrists) etc should be interesting



Whose War?

A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative


The War Party may have gotten its war. But it has also gotten something it did not bargain for. Its membership lists and associations have been exposed and its motives challenged. In a rare moment in U.S. journalism, Tim Russert put this question directly to Richard Perle: “Can you assure American viewers ... that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”

Suddenly, the Israeli connection is on the table, and the War Party is not amused. Finding themselves in an unanticipated firefight, our neoconservative friends are doing what comes naturally, seeking student deferments from political combat by claiming the status of a persecuted minority group. People who claim to be writing the foreign policy of the world superpower, one would think, would be a little more manly in the schoolyard of politics. Not so.

Former Wall Street Journal editor Max Boot kicked off the campaign. When these “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative’—and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen—it sometimes sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” Yet Boot readily concedes that a passionate attachment to Israel is a “key tenet of neoconservatism.” He also claims that the National Security Strategy of President Bush “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” (For the uninitiated, Commentary, the bible in which Boot seeks divine guidance, is the monthly of the American Jewish Committee.)

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard wails that attacks based on the Israel tie have put him through personal hell: “Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail and in my mailbox. ... Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It’s just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite Right, but on the peace-movement left.”

Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan endures his own purgatory abroad: “In London ... one finds Britain’s finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the ‘neoconservative’ (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy.”

Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic charges that our little magazine “has been transformed into a forum for those who contend that President Bush has become a client of ... Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party.’”

Referencing Charles Lindbergh, he accuses Paul Schroeder, Chris

http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html

 

What? no comments? jem? dgabriel? trade556? nitro?, Pabst,? Readen? resinate? traderkey?AAA?

goes with this thread http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24176&perpage=6&pagenumber=3

are we just starting to realize what is probably happening and we are speechless?

 

I'm speechless beacuse I fear Buchanan may be partially correct.

Here's something I don't understand though: If a 2% minority is able to twist and manipulate the vast majority to our will, what does that say about the 98% majority? How weak minded & easily manipulated are they?

 

i'm getting tired of your un-patriotic rants. trotskyism is the new conservatism...if you don't like it move to russia. no, wait..... scratch that. let me get back to you on that one.

 

Of course there is a lot of truth to what Buchanan says, which is why he is attacked so mercilessly. Better to discredit him than address his arguments.

I've noticed an interesting transformation. In the 70's and 80's it was conservatives who were largely upset at the disproportionate influence Jews had on our foreign policy. Now it's the left and far left who have becoming harshly critical of Israel, even as they accuse Bush of being Hitler reborn.

Buchanan glosses over a few important points. Is Israel entitled to exist? Why should we abandon it just because a bunch of fanatical Muslims demands it? How would they react if we suddenly decided that control of Mecca was something we really wanted?

He seems to imagine that if we abandoned Israel, our troubles would go away. That is naive in the extreme. The jihadists have a long list of grievances and Israel is only one. Where do we appease them next? Maybe we could ban any church but Islam in the US.

There is plenty of terrorism in the world that has nothing to do with Israel, in Indonesia, Pakistan, Chechnea and Sri Lanka for example.

 

no different than a couple of sheepherders, sheering and occasionally killing, 100 sheep in the farm. You know, trying to protect the sheepl from the big bad wolves outside and all
mushrooms I tell you mushrooms, feed em bullshit and keep them in the dark.

Who controls the news? what do the vast majority see and decide upon? Throw in there "patriotism" focus on an outside enemy and you got a successful system to govern and fleece

 

Wrong!! brother C. I like it wayyy too much. I want it to be practiced as designed, and not full of fraud, abuse and extreme manipulation.

 

Agreed, many valid points. No need to abandon Israel, but killing anyone else around in the name of our "surrogate state there" won't make the problems go away. Mistakes of the previous generations are haunting us, and we are not learning. We are repeating the same shit, greater magnitude. But I digress

 

Here we go again

Pat Buchanan

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: December 10, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.


A close read of President Bush's November addresses at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington and at the Whitehall Palace in London leads a traditionalist almost to despair.

George Bush did not write this democratist drivel. This is the kind of messianic rhetoric he probably never heard before he became president. Who is putting these words in his mouth? For if George Bush truly intends to lead a "global democratic revolution," and convert not only Iraq but the whole Middle East to democracy, he has ceased to be a conservative and we are headed for endless conflicts, disappointments, disillusionment and tragedy.

At London, he called a "commitment to the global expansion of democracy" both "the alternative to instability and to hatred and terror" and "the third pillar of our security." But before he wagers our security on a crusade for democracy, Bush should ask the hard questions no one seems to have asked before he invaded Iraq.

Where in the Constitution is he empowered to go around the world destabilizing governments? Can he truly believe that by hectoring such autocracies as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, America is more secure? Who comes to power if Mubarak goes in Cairo, the Saudi monarchy falls or Musharaff is ousted in Pakistan? If memory serves, the last wave of popular revolutions in the region gave us Nasser, Khadafi, Saddam and the Ayatollah.

With $200 billion sunk into democratizing Iraq and Afghanistan, how many more wars does Bush think Americans will support before they decide to throw the interventionist Republicans out?

Where did he get the idea we are insecure because the Islamic world is not democratic? The Islamic world has never been democratic. Yet, before we intervened massively there, our last threat came from Barbary pirates. Lest we forget, Muhammad Atta and his comrades did not plot their atrocities in the Sunni Triangle, but in Hamburg and Delray Beach.

Surveys show that Islamic people bear a deep resentment of U.S. dominance of their region and our one-sided support for Israel. Interventionism is not America's solution, it is America's problem.

It was our earlier intervention in the Gulf War and our huge footprint on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia that lead directly to 9-11. They were over here because we were over there.

If one-man, one-vote comes to Pakistan, what do we do if that nuclear nation supports a return of the Taliban? What do we do if the Iraqi regime that takes power after free elections tells us to pack up and get out, and declares the liberation of Kuwait and its return to the embrace of the motherland to be as vital to Baghdad as the return of Taiwan is to Beijing?

Freedom, the president said, "must be chosen and defended by those who choose it." Exactly. Why not then let these Islamic peoples choose it on their own timetable and defend it themselves?

It is "cultural condescension," says Bush, "to assume the Middle East cannot be converted to democracy. ... Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking."

But if 22 of 22 Arab states are non-democratic, this would seem to suggest that this soil is not particularly conducive to growing the kind of democracies we raise in upper New England. This may be mulish thinking to the progressives at NED, but it may also be common sense.

What support is there in history for the view that as we meddle in the affairs of foreign nations, we advance our security? How would we have responded in the 19th century if Britain had declared a policy of destabilizing the American Union until Andrew Jackson abolished slavery?

"Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress here on earth." Is it? Before democracy became our god, we used to believe that salvation was Heaven's plan for humanity, and Jesus Christ was the way, the truth and the life.

The neocons have made democracy a god, but why is George W. Bush falling down and worshiping their golden calf?

The last time we heard rhetoric like Bush's at NED and Whitehall Castle was the last time we were bogged down in a war. LBJ declared that America's goal was far loftier than saving South Vietnam. We were going to build a "Great Society on the Mekong."

Like Woodrow Wilson, Bush has been converted to the belief that democracy is the cure for mankind's ills. But our Founding Fathers did not even believe in democracy. They thought they were creating a republic – a republic that would be secure by remaining free of the wars of the blood-soaked continent their fathers had left behind. How wrong they were.