Posted on 01/13/2004 3:59:40 PM PST by Stone Mountain
This and Rove is the crux of the problem with the Bush (far from conservative) administration.
Jim Lobe - NO!!!!!!!!!!!
Lobe seems disturbed by this because he makes the mistake people often make where democracy is concerned. Democracy is not liberty, those two are quite distinct concepts of course. Democracy in the absense of the rule of law, in the absense of a cultural respect for individual rights, leads straight to dictatorship. One man, one vote, one time, as the joke goes.
In the case of Algeria, the leading opposition movement was Islamist. In their war of rebellion since the elections were canceled they have killed a quarter of million Algerians, mostly civilians. They are famous for cordoning off a beach and killing all of the beach goers, or throwing up a roadblock and killing every motorist that drives by, or entering a village during the night and cutting the throats of every villager, and taking all night to do it.
This only proves that the government was right not to turn the government over to these people. You never enter a democratic contest with people that are determined to rule you, you never enter an electoral contest with people who will kill you if you disagree with them.
You have to recognize that these people are at war with you, and your best hope is to admit it and wage war with them. Never submit to them, not even in the name of democracy, because it may be the last mistake you ever make.
Wrong - trade agreements where we end up importing more than exporting. [China is a most favored trading partner]
and Why - American jobs and factories are exported.
Frum is not a former liberal (one meaning of neo-con) but has always been conservative.
Another meaning of neo-con is a conservative who accepts the permanence of the welfare state. Frum doesn't. He is a libertarian in economics whose first book, Dead Right, argued that Reagan-era conservatism had essentially failed domestically because it hadn't succeeded in dismantling the welfare state.
Neo-cons are also sometimes contrasted with social conservatives. This is odd, because a lot of the ex-liberals who got that name in the 80's were pushed over the line from liberalism in large measure by abortion and the decline of the family. But it is a perception some people have. But Frum is a social conservative and always has been.
He's only a "neo" in foreign policy if the old "America Firsters" define American conservatism. But the conservative movement that was born after WWII was never isolationist. If Frum is a neo-con in foreign policy then so was Ronald Reagan.
This review is the same kind of whining that the Left used to do about Reagan putting missiles in Europe, working for missile defence, taking out or undermining the Communists in Grenada, Nicaragua etc. Just sending out ultimatums all over the place, how rude, how dangerous!
Frum and Perle want us actually to end global terrorism, not find a way to live with it, just as Reagan (and Perle) wanted to end Soviet Communism. By contrast, the whine-Left wants us to hide behind the UN and send out US Marshalls with warrants to arrest the naughty litterbugs so we can get them social workers; the whine-Right wants us to hide behind walls and fences and slowly curdle into bitter mediocrity.
I don't say I agree with every proposal Frum and Perle make, but they're the sort we ought to be taking seriously and making substantive arguments with -- if we don't want our grandchildren's lives to be lived within limits imposed from Tehran or Damascus or the Pakistani hills.
Until this happens they need to be dealt with in the most harsh way possible. Much harsher than we have been.
The other problem is they're following a false prophet, which brings with it all kinds of problems. This needs to change as well.
and the neo-con's( I do not mean conservative Jews ) prescription to avoid bitter mediocrity is what? To engage in unending military conflict, a constant nation-destroying, building program? Perpetual aggression and coersion aimed everywhere. All for national security and national greatness? The neocon's recipe will result in exactly the opposite of what they hope to achieve.
Who only managed to kill three thousand people, bring down the World Trade Center, do major damage to the Pentagon, and come within a hairsbreadth of obliterating the White House. A mere pinprick. Seems to me what 9-11 proved was that less than twenty people with box cutters could kill Americans within our borders in numbers that world class armies failed to do in two world wars.
My post said nothing about Napoleonic conquest by crack Arab troops. I have no fear that Syria could conquer the US, nor do Frum and Perle. The point is that the festering swamp of the Arab world breeds organized groups of terrorists whose goal is not to conquer the United States, but to corrode our national self confidence and erode our social peace until we implode, fall in upon ourselves in fear.
I don't see any reason that their effort could not succeed. No society's fabric of order is so strong that it could not descend into Liberian chaos within two or three generations. If the terrorists persist, and we try to "manage" the problem rather than put an end to it, there is every reason at least to fear that the day will come sooner or later when the government cannot control it.
The swamp breeds the terrorists, and the terrorists could not operate without the manifold connivance of the dismal corrupt states which maintain the swamp. It is surely at least reasonable to suggest that the only way to end the threat is to drain the swamp.
You pays your money and you takes your choice I suppose. You lot have nightmares of Mexifornia; I have nightmares of Monrovia USA, one big Belfast from sea to shining sea. You think people like me are alarmists; I think people like you are blind as bats. I don't know how to get past that, and I don't want to get into a shouting match about it.
While I respect Perle's intellect and experience, I certainly don't regard Frum as a serious National - defense conservative. He's merely the chief polemicist of the bunch. What's his experience in defense?
What is delusional is "victory or holocaust". Delusional and dangerous.
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