Posted on 05/23/2007 9:22:05 AM PDT by Irontank
Rudy Giuliani, R-9/11, "won" - insofar as a game-show charade like that produces any winners - the Republican presidential debate last week, thanks to Texas Rep. Ron Paul. When Paul said that prior U.S. military involvement in the Middle East was partly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, Giuliani's eyes blazed, smoke curled from his nostrils, and he briefly cut loose on the libertarian gadfly for supposedly blaming America for the attacks.
Though Paul courageously stood his ground, the Giuliani bristle became the debate's most talked-about moment. Advantage: Giuliani.
In the heat of the moment, this former New Yorker wanted Mayor Giuliani to stalk across the stage and slap Paul silly. But on reflection, I grudgingly concede that Paul did us all a favor. He had the guts to suggest before a hostile audience that America needs to think harder about how projecting military power around the world in our customary manner creates blowback. As emotionally satisfying as Giuliani's response was, indignation is not an argument, and "How dare you!" is not a response. Paul was substantially correct and deserved better.
Even though the United States is trapped in a terrible quagmire in Iraq, one we made for ourselves through our own foolish and unnecessary choices, it is still impossible for our politicians to talk frankly about how this catastrophe came about. In his 2005 book, "The New American Militarism," Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University scholar, points out that in post-World War I America, "there existed within the national political arena a lively awareness that war is inherently poisonous, giving rise to all sorts of problematic consequences, and that military power is something that democracies ought to treat gingerly."
"Today," Bacevich continues, "in sharp contrast, such sensitivities have been all but snuffed out. When it comes to military matters, the national political stage does not accommodate contrarian voices, even from those ostensibly most critical of actually existing policy." Yep. Ask Ron Paul.
Bacevich warns that the way contemporary Americans think about the military, its uses and America's place in the world leads us into dangerous folly divorced from America's principles and interests - and indeed from the hideous reality of war. As a combat veteran of Vietnam and the Gulf War, and as a political conservative, Bacevich speaks with particular authority.
Americans today, he writes, have romanticized the military and its effectiveness and have embraced a completely unrealistic view of what war really means. The all-volunteer military has meant many, even most, Americans have no direct experience of military life or combat - hence our weakness for "Top Gun" patriotic abstractions.
When coupled with both the long-standing American convictions that our values are universal and that we have the right to do what we must to live as we'd like, this worldview leads Americans to an easy embrace of military solutions to the nation's overseas challenges. Americans today are so infatuated with our own power that we fail to recognize its limits or what exercising it imprudently costs us. Which is what the bullied Paul was trying to get at.
Bacevich has been one of the most forceful and eloquent critics of the Iraq war, the course of which he has recently described as "disastrous" and now beyond the United States' power to determine. He is no simplistic Bush-basher. In "The New American Militarism," the professor says it's too easy to blame President Bush and his inner circle for the Iraq debacle, calling it "an exercise in scapegoating that lets too many others off the hook and allows society at large to abdicate responsibility for what has come to pass."
You may have seen Andy Bacevich's name in the news recently - even though you probably missed his essay in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which he notes that "the thousands of Americans killed in Iraq include no members of Congress and not a single general." No, the Andy Bacevich you likely heard about is Professor Bacevich's namesake - his son, his only son - who was killed last week fighting in Iraq.
This is what Bush's folly - and our own - has brought to pass for one American family, and for thousands of others since this war began. One way or another, we will all pay for American hubris and for our refusal even to talk about these things in the national political arena. But very few of us will pay as much as families like the Baceviches have. Which is a big part of the problem.
Exactly. Too many Americans now view as heroic US government bureaucrats' use of the American military to rescue foreign peoples, depose dicatators half a world away and generally try to control the politics of foreign nations in ways that have no relation to the interests of the American people. It wasn't always this way...Americans used to view the use of the military as another extension of government power and force. As Ron Paul noted...conservatives have traditionally stood against the big-government types' habit of getting the US military involved in war
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
--James Madison
who gives these people a format on Conservative mags?
There is an enemy within.
Ping
This runs counter to the Michelle Malkin, Alice in Wonderland, Off With His Head response that seems to be in current favor.
You Ron Paul lovers are sickening and not much different than the left. Have you forgotten that it is the Islamic nutjoibs who started this war. Did Osama consult with you before giving the greenlight to start the war against the West?
A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
http://crunchycon.nationalreview.com/about/
I don’t think that they realize that while their hero’s comments may be a restatement of bin Laden’s given reasons for attacking us that he’s giving legitimacy to those reasons and the act of doing so is what has people pissed at him.
The world is not that complicated. Every day national security problems are solved by the mere act of millions placing their skulls below ground level with swiveling rumps adorned with KICKME signs.
Apparently the son mentioned in the article was not one of them. May he be fittingly so honored.
That's the same reaction I have to you guys who seem to have an incordinate amount of naive faith in the government. I, for one, generally accept the findings of the Department of Defense when it found:
As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
--1997 Summer Study Task Force on Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats
Yes...kill the Islamic nutjobs that struck us...at the same time, figure out how to extract the US government from this region and then let the rest of the nutjobs kill each other
Wasn't Madison the guy who fled Washington before British soldiers burned down the White House?
LOL In other words, this is the manifesto of the liberal who pretends to be a conservative.
I think he used up his hyperbole quota in this sentence alone.
Let me ask you...which of those principles do you see as not being conservative?
Not the Iraq war. We started that, when we invaded Iraq. The "nutjobs" were out of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, not Iraq. And even Bush now admits what the 9-11 commission found - no Iraq connection with 9-11. Meanwhile, the nutjobs who did 9-11 - including their leader, Osama - are still plotting more 9-11s.
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