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How Bill Kristol Closed the Conservative Mind
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE ^ | 12/18/2018 | Jack Hunter

Posted on 12/18/2018 10:32:49 PM PST by Forgotten Amendments

“Kristol was trying to remake the Republican Party,” Carlson says.

A significant part of Kristol’s GOP makeover project was portraying antiwar conservatives as heretics.

Carlson recounts, “Years later, writer Philip Weiss described a conversation he had with Kristol in which this [remaking the GOP] became explicit. There are Republicans, Kristol told Weiss, ‘of whom I disapprove so much that I won’t appear with them. That I’ve encouraged that they be expelled or not welcomed into the Republican Party.’”

“’I’d be happy if Ron Paul left and ran as a third party candidate. I was very happy when Pat Buchanan was allowed to go off and run as a third party candidate,’” Carlson recalls Weiss saying of his conversation with Kristol.

This is no secret. The most high-profile conservative proponents of a more restrained foreign policy over the last two decades—Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Rand Paul—were constant targets of Kristol long before the rise of Donald Trump.

(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government
KEYWORDS: globalists; gope; kristol; libertarians; media; patbuchanan; randpaul; rinos; ronpaul; ronpaulians; williamkristol
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To: Bookshelf
"The Marines sent under Bush had left, and it was the Clinton regime that attempted a fruitless nation-building that has continued from that day to this"

I can tell you for a fact that the Marines had not left as I was one of those Marines. We were there from December 1992 - April 1993, BTW a very nice Christmas/New Years present from George H Bush. I truly enjoyed Christmas in the Mog [/sarcasm]. You are correct that the mission changed, but it did not change to Nation building. It changed from one of security for the UN delivering food shipments to one of going after weapons caches of the warlords and disarming them. I don't even want to get into the rules of engagement we were under.

This goes to my original point about Operation Restore Hope. It was never about delivering food. Food in that part of the world is power. In order to deliver food to the starving people you had to change the political/societal power structure of the warlords there. None of that was in our national interests and therefore we should have never gone there IMO.
41 posted on 12/19/2018 7:17:14 AM PST by Old Teufel Hunden
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To: Alberta's Child

Add Fred Barnes to that mix...Can’t stand the guy! Used to rail against him years ago on FR.


42 posted on 12/19/2018 7:34:30 AM PST by chasio649 (Donald Trump is not the president we need, he is the president SJWs deserve)
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To: Old Teufel Hunden

Thanks for that post.


43 posted on 12/19/2018 7:35:24 AM PST by Romans Nine
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To: Widget Jr

+1 Can’t agree more.


44 posted on 12/19/2018 7:37:24 AM PST by chasio649 (Donald Trump is not the president we need, he is the president SJWs deserve)
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To: Sir_Humphrey

I hear you, but I too supported going into those places and kicking some ass, after what they did on 9-11 and the way Iraq HUMILIATED our country by not complying with the agreements that they signed to end the first Gulf War.

But I’ve changed my stance because I’m not an idiot either and I know that unless you bring people to their KNEES, as in WW2, they will simply ride you out, as has been done to us, since we dumped lives and treasure into those countries that had no intention of ever taking us seriously. A totally different conclusion from the first war, and something that should have never been attempted.


45 posted on 12/19/2018 7:37:45 AM PST by BobL (I eat at McDonald's and shop at Walmart - I just don't tell anyone.)
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To: Romans Nine

No problem. While I agree with the writer of this article in some sense I think that both sides have to allow the debate on this very important issue of what our national strategy should be.

Bill Kristol on one side trying to oust any conservative who is not for war is dumb.

Similarly, Ron Paul labeling everyone who is for a pre-emption national strategy policy as a neocon and globalist is also dumb.

It’s a very important debate and one we should have. I say make your arguments and let fellow conservatives decide what is best going forward. While I like a lot of what both of them have said over the years, they are the extremes on the issue of our National Strategy post 9/11. I admit I am closer to Kristol on the issue but that in no way means that I favor getting into every possible engagement. The war in Libya is a prime example. I said we shouldn’t help the Europeans at that time and I believe that has shown to be a disaster to our national interests as well as Europe’s.


46 posted on 12/19/2018 7:45:23 AM PST by Old Teufel Hunden
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To: Old Teufel Hunden

There are a few things in that I can agree with and a few things I can’t. This particular item indicates a big picture issue that should be addressed:

>thoughtomator, the country harbored and protected an Islamo Fascist group that did attack us.

The Taliban, the de facto ruler of the nation, asked merely for the evidence that OBL was involved in 9/11, since that is perfectly normal and expected in any extradition request - every country does the same, including ours.

The details of how exactly that went down are something you should become familiar with. Eventually you will ask, as so many others, why Bush didn’t simply give them the proof and avoid what is now a generation-long war.

The Taliban were willing to turn OBL over given the evidence, and we give evidence in every other extradition case as a routine matter, yet it was specifically refused here.

While we’re at it, the American people can use this evidence too, as we don’t actually have it. I know that may seem astonishing, but go look - there is no public-domain information definitively pointing to OBL as the perpetrator of 9/11.


47 posted on 12/19/2018 7:48:46 AM PST by thoughtomator (Number of arrested coup conspirators to date: 2)
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To: Old Teufel Hunden
"...so that they don't come over..."

That's the core of the problem right there - someone in government is letting them come over - for political reasons. Japan somehow doesn't have to send an expeditionary force to Somalia to keep Somali bombers out of Tokyo - but we import future bombers to Minnesota and hand them welfare checks.

48 posted on 12/19/2018 8:32:19 AM PST by Mr. Jeeves ([CTRL]-[GALT]-[DELETE])
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To: Old Teufel Hunden

I was personally involved in the decision to move food to Somalia. The NGOs, which like CARE, Catholic Relief, CWS, MSF, etc., etc., have a large following in the Congress, complained mightily that they could not respond to famine because warlords were well armed. (It was a close thing that Somalia came along or Bush may have opted for the occupation of Southern Sudan.) Responding to that pressure, and to the fact that there was an extensive famine, the Marines were sent to Somalia. They accomplished their mission (or your mission, if you prefer). I should have been clear, the Marines left when they should have under the Bush plan. I was unaware that there were Marines in Somalia at the time of Black Hawk Down.


49 posted on 12/19/2018 8:51:23 AM PST by Bookshelf
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To: chasio649

Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, Stephen Hayes, ........all neocons


50 posted on 12/19/2018 9:06:46 AM PST by georgiarat (The most expensive thing in the world is a cheap Army and Navy. - Carl Vinson)
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To: Forgotten Amendments

Bill Kristol and his allies made it their life’s mission to purge the GOP and mainstream conservative media of any and voices that question our commitment to “nation building” foreign policy and an open borders immigration policy. For years, neoconservatives were successful at silencing or marginalizing their critics. Now the tides have turned - conservatives have finally realized that the Beltway elite internationalism peddled by Kristol would have been more at home among Clinton Democrats.


51 posted on 12/19/2018 9:36:55 AM PST by ek_hornbeck
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To: Old Teufel Hunden

Foreign policy and national security are incredibly fickle subjects.

As the father of two Marines, if my sons get sent out to “war” I would like to know there is a clearly defined objective with an anticipated out come and a viable strategy to achieve that which comes from the military not from a politician.

Go, fight, win and come home.

I do understand there are times to occupy but I think that has been abused by politicians to such a degree that it is nearly unrecognizable.


52 posted on 12/19/2018 9:59:42 AM PST by Romans Nine
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To: Old Teufel Hunden
You make several good points in your post. I think most people on this thread would be in agreement that the initial strikes against the Afghan Taliban were a just and necessary war. I think where people may disagree is how the aftermath should have been handled.

Neoconservatives have this obsession with "global Democracy" and "nation building" - the insane idea that Third World tribal societies can be transformed into western-style constitutional democracies and market economies. A decade and a half of "nation-building" in Afghanistan has failed miserably, and the same enterprise in Iraq hasn't fared much better, because the primary loyalties there as in Afghanistan are to ethnic group, tribe, and religious sect rather than any abstract notion of a nation-state.

Moreover, the post-9/11 strike against the Taliban and Al Quaeda strongholds were clearly justified from a national security perspective, as are efforts against ISIS today as ISIS targets US and western countries for terrorist attack. However, in the neoconservative worldview, the fact that a country is run by a brutal or corrupt dictator is reason enough to launch a war for regime change and "democratization," in spite of the fact that the brutal dictator in question is usually the only thing keeping a powderkeg of tribal and sectarian rivalries from exploding into outright war. This is precisely what happened in Iraq and Libya when they were targeted for regime change, and what's going on now in Syria after Obama, Hillary, and McCain gave the "Arab Spring" their the green light.

53 posted on 12/19/2018 10:10:18 AM PST by ek_hornbeck
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To: Olog-hai
And thanks to draconian rules of engagement put on our military, no foreign policy has been more restrained than that of the USA.

One can love the US, and still see this as nonsense.

Andorra and Slovenia do not have forces in 74 countries around the world.

Iceland and Bhutan are not currently fighting two or three or four or five wars.

People like Kristol were part of that restraint too.

Check your back issues. Whatever else Kristol and friends were, they weren't restrained.

54 posted on 12/19/2018 10:21:17 AM PST by x
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To: x

Andorra and Slovenia are not the United States any more than Iceland or Bhutan are. Red herring. Even worse for them, since Slovenia is part of the European Union and surrendered its sovereignty, Andorra is surrounded by two EU “big states”, Iceland cannot fend off the EU without the help of the USA if things come down to that, and Bhutan is bordered by Red China with whom they do not have diplomatic relations (and things would get hot for them if India got friendlier with China).

And what I mean with respect to Kristol is that he was typically not critical of having the rules of engagement that restrained US forces from absolute victory remain in place.


55 posted on 12/19/2018 10:30:24 AM PST by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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To: Bookshelf
"The NGOs, which like CARE, Catholic Relief, CWS, MSF, etc., etc., have a large following in the Congress, complained mightily that they could not respond to famine because warlords were well armed."

As far as I am aware, the Marines were not there for Blackhawk down. I was not. That happened in August 1993 and we left in April 1993. However, when we left we could have predicted Blackhawk down because the mission had already changed.

You encapsulate the problem in your above statement. The warlords were preventing our shipments of food to starving people. It had nothing to do with a lack of food. As I said earlier, we have enough food to feed the world. We could eliminate famine on this earth for all intents and purposes if the problem was starving families. It's always more than that because food in many parts of the world is used as a weapon.

It comes down to this, there was no national interest in our going into Somalia. So America has to ask ourselves if it is worth Americas sons and daughters to go in and fix Somali society. Do you think that when we eventually pulled out in 1994 (I believe) that the people stopped starving? America should have never committed our forces to Somalia. If we really wanted to help, we should have gotten African forces in there to solve the crisis. We could have used Mercs (oh, no not those evil mercenaries!!) to solve the immediate situation and then worked with our partners in the region to solve it long term through African forces or UN forces. It was not our fight.
56 posted on 12/19/2018 10:33:52 AM PST by Old Teufel Hunden
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To: Romans Nine
"As the father of two Marines, if my sons get sent out to “war” I would like to know there is a clearly defined objective with an anticipated out come and a viable strategy to achieve that which comes from the military not from a politician."

As an American citizen, that is absolutely your right. I agree with you completely. Semper Fi

"I do understand there are times to occupy but I think that has been abused by politicians to such a degree that it is nearly unrecognizable."

As a well informed citizen we can figure it out. Yes, they will abuse it. I can give examples of that. However, in the instance of Syria right now, I think it's clear that we still need to wipe out the last ISIS controlled city before we leave. We also have to ensure our other objectives are met (Iran withdrawl and protection for our Kurdish allies). That is not much to ask for with the 2000 troops in Syria to leave. It's not open ended.
57 posted on 12/19/2018 10:39:05 AM PST by Old Teufel Hunden
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To: Olog-hai
Please tell me what "foreign policy" is at work in Afghanistan.

There is none.

The U.S. hasn't had a coherent policy in Afghanistan for at least 15 years.

58 posted on 12/19/2018 10:43:45 AM PST by Alberta's Child ("The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them ... like Russians will.")
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To: stockpirate
Same here.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 I wrote the bastard off as a retarded baboon.

59 posted on 12/19/2018 10:44:31 AM PST by Alberta's Child ("The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them ... like Russians will.")
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To: Alberta's Child

I mentioned fighting for total victory in a previous post. If that means wiping out the warlords along with the Taliban and criminalizing Islam, so be it. Never mind putting the fear of the true God into Iran and Pakistan.

If there is “none”, then there is none applied. I absolutely agree that what has been in practice in Afghanistan is utterly incoherent.


60 posted on 12/19/2018 10:48:28 AM PST by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
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