|
By
Scott McConnell |
The American
Conservative
| November 8, 2004
Editorial
Comment:
In recent
months, in lectures before varied audiences in the US,
Europe and Israel, I had referred to certain Christian
fundamentalist thinking that had influenced "Bush's
brain". This point of view has received confirmation
from a most unlikely source, the highly influential
American Conservative magazine. There they confirm
that certain high level advisers in the Bush
Administration framed the US policy in Israel on the
basis of fundamentalist notions of hastening
Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. Other
segments in the conservative movement in the US do not
agree with this approach, among other aspects of the
Bush administration. So this influential group of
conservatives are endorsing Kerry while stating very
clearly that they will oppose a Kerry administration
from day one! The article also contains other valuable
perspectives. So, read on.
*Kerry's the One*
By Scott McConnell
The American Conservative
November 8, 2004 Issue
*Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy
or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In an
effort to deepen our readers' and our own understanding of the options before
us, we've asked several of our editors and contributors to make "the
conservative case" for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki's column
closing out this issue, constitute TAC's endorsement. - The American
Conservative Editors*
There is little in John Kerry's persona or platform that appeals to
conservatives. The flip-flopper charge - the centerpiece of the Republican
campaign against Kerry - seems overdone, as Kerry's contrasting votes are the
sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole
could tell you all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no
candidate for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will
always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of
charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from
within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a
Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean
up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen deficits
and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee.
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the
surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and
in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he
is the leader of America's conservative party, he has become the Left's perfect
foil - its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has
mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II:
both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an
unnecessary war that shattered their countries' budgets. Lenin needed the
calamitous reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to
be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for
generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat
to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically
favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be
passed on to the nation's children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those
outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect
every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it
into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposal
- Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the
wage is so low that an American can't be found to do it - and you have a
presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely
noxious cocktail.
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency has
degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has always
been "anti-Americanism." After the Second World War many European intellectuals
argued for a "Third Way" between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism,
and a generation later Europe's radicals embraced every ragged
"anti-imperialist" cause that came along. In South America, defiance of "the
Yanqui" always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these
sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he
has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by
businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never
before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for
Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll
numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush
is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge
piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an
unfavorable view of the United States. It's the same throughout the Middle East.
Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine
under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if
it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the
latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme,
what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a
foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the
basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American president has
ever taken before. It is not something that "good" countries do. It is the main
reason that people all over the world who used to consider the United States a
reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to
their own peace and security.
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies
in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More
tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United
States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the
American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians
killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has
helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists - indeed
his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and
brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge.
Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to
America's survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials
and controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign
countries to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the
world's most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help.
I've heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served
prominently in his father's administration say that he could not possibly have
conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially
taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam
Hussein. Bush's public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never
read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who
makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the
information flow to the president, how are various options are presented?
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one
of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real
decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains
to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the
U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory.
Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency
- and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council
in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the
Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud
Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign policy.
But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intellectuals
and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within
the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as part of
a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These
two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush
presidency - and President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would
restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell's departure from the State
Department looming, Bush is more than ever the "neoconian candidate." The only
way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian
Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.
If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day
forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican
Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge
soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out
how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more
traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism
informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity
with the American past - and to make that case without a powerful White House
pulling in the opposite direction.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any
kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on
the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by
American armies - a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky's concept of global
revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies -
temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election - are just as extreme. A
re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage
immigrants to do jobs Americans "won't do." This election is all about George W.
Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative
support.
Original Location:
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html
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