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<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">...Buehler..?..Buehler...?...Buehler...?<br>
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The American Spectator is the usual sounding box of the perpetual
bensteinish Ben Stein<br>
and is generally rather quasi-neoconnish.<br>
<br>
It is interesting to read this attack on the warmongerers.<br>
<br>
****<br>
<br>
Neoconservatism Interrupted<br>
<br>
By Neal B. Freeman on 8.18.11 @ 6:10AM<br>
<br>
<a
href="http://spectator.org/archives/2011/08/18/neoconservatism-interrupted/print">http://spectator.org/archives/2011/08/18/neoconservatism-interrupted/print</a><br>
<br>
You will remember the Obama campaign of 2008. His was a fresh and
pleasingly multicultural face and his candidacy, although unexamined by
an incurious national media, took pains to present a foreign policy
sharply different from either the meliorism of Hillary Clinton or the
jingoism of John McCain. Barack Obama was unambiguously the peace
candidate and it was on that basis that he became our President.<br>
<br>
That was then. Once in office, Obama established Ms. Clinton as his
Secretary of State, listened long and mindfully to Sen. McCain, and
then proceeded to outreach both of them in an intermittently coherent
but unmistakably neoconservative assault on the Middle East (however
horrified the anti-Israeli Obama would be to know he's acting
neoconservatively). Obama amped up the war in Afghanistan, started
another one in Libya, helped to topple a staunch U.S. ally in Egypt,
and launched "kinetic military actions" against Somalia and Yemen that,
to the locals, looked very much like war. All of these initiatives were
undertaken in the name of Western democratic values and, unlike the
Bush wars, could not be said to have been contaminated by either a
thirst for Arab oil or a hunger for Israeli favor. Obama's policy was
manifestly propelled by neoconservative impulse, most brightly
illuminated in the putsch against Mubarak. In that instance, the U.S.
made it clear that it would support any successor regime. Our strategic
judgment, ultimately arrived at, was this: better the street mob, any
street mob, than the aging autocrat, even a reliably pro-American
autocrat. That judgment represented neoconservatism in its distilled
form.<br>
<br>
The reaction here at home to Obama's neocon tropism has been both
predictable and disappointing. From the peace movement, predictably,
there has been protest so restrained as to be almost inaudible. It
appears that only Republican wars summon "the movement" to principled
dissent and ideological flash mob. Democratic wars are different
somehow and must be examined closely for nuance overlooked and
consequence unintended. As of this writing, that examination continues.
(Sanders? Waters? Anyone? Anyone?) Within the broader base of the
Democratic Party, out beyond the anti-war fringe, there has congealed
what appears to be a resigned and perplexed acquiescence. If Obama will
just get on with the central business of income redistribution, the
party activists seem to be saying, he is free to spray Western values
around the Middle East even if he chooses to do so at the tips of
missiles.<br>
<br>
The disappointing response has come from the Republicans. On Capitol
Hill, we now have reports of "conservative Congressmen" mobilizing
against the skin-deep cuts proposed for the defense budget (even before
the specific reductions are particularized by the so-called Super
Committee). I don't pretend to have interviewed these Pentagon hawks in
depth, but a quick scan suggests that the operative word here is much
more likely to be "Congressmen" than "conservative." It is hard to find
a conservative anywhere, either sitting in Congress or fretting at
home, who thinks that the U.S. should continue to spend more on defense
than all of the other almost-two hundred countries of the world
combined. (The minor cuts suggested -- what the Pentagon lobby
describes as "gutting the military" -- would impose a reduction in the
rate of increase.) Do Republicans support a strong national defense?
Absolutely. And they have no trouble whatsoever in separating Obama's
wars from our heroic warriors: virtually all conservatives and most
libertarians support American servicemen and women without reservation.
But… legions of democracy imposing "Western values" on Muslims at the
point of a bayonet? Trust me. There are reservations.<br>
<br>
My sense of the Capitol Hill hawks, in other words, is that they are
acting very much like Congressmen and not at all like conservatives.
They want to keep the juice flowing to the military base back in the
district, as also the grants to the research outfits, the contracts to
the suppliers, and the fees to the lobbyists who keep the process
running agreeably for all concerned. (For all of those directly
concerned, to put it more carefully.) If any of these Congressmen are
zealots fired by the neocon incubus, I haven't spotted them. They seem
to be nothing more than politicians doing what politicians do, which
should be cause more for ongoing dismay than proximate alarm.<br>
<br>
The response from the GOP's presidential candidates has been more
disappointing still. With the usual exception of Ron Paul -- a phrase
that, in a more perfect world, political reporters could type with a
single keystroke -- all of the candidates are flipping through the old
neocon songbook about legitimate aspirations and democratic structures
and the blessings of modernity, all of which will soon be attainable if
we will just exercise patience and sign the check and embrace the
wisdom of, uh, wait a sec, here it is -- Plan F. Each time the GOP
candidates debauch from the time capsule and strut out onto the 2011
debate platform, it is as if the last decade never really happened. It
is as if we were still back in 2001 and, with our troops marching off
to Afghanistan to deliver a much-deserved, swift, and punitive blow,
the commander had crossed out the original orders at the last minute
and scribbled in, "Oh, and while you're there, replace their ancient
society with one like ours. No hurry -- and spare no expense."<br>
<br>
What's that old wives' tale about nature abhorring a vacuum? Not in
contemporary politics, it doesn't. Nature this year is put off by the
vacuum and buffered by the consensus. All of the GOP candidates, pace
Mr. Paul, are clustered around the conventional wisdom that we must
back our troops -- as if these missions were of their design -- and
continue to stare into the blackness of the abyss. Wouldn't you think
that Providence or raw political calculation or even a Hail Mary pass
from a single-digit outrider would offer up some alternative
possibility, some shifting of the exhausted paradigm? (Gingrich?
Johnson? Anyone? Anyone?) <br>
<br>
Actually, you would think that if you had spent the summer as I have
done. Eager to learn how regime change might possibly be configured
next year, I have been out talking to people with skills and passions
and long lists of digital contacts. (I have too much respect for the
Broders and Novaks of journalistic legend to call these wanderings
shoe-leather reporting. It's more of a Yogi Berra thing, where I have
attempted to see things by looking around.) What I have found, or
tripped over, is what I predict the major media will find, and view
with alarm, before the snow flies. Namely, that there's a potent new
force in American politics and that it is coming together crisply with
strength and purpose. Call it the extended military family. It includes
not just active-duty spouses and retired military personnel, and not
just their families, friends and base-neighbors. It includes also a
vast number of Americans who love the military, honor them and see in
them a unique restorative capability in a society gone soft and
commonsense-less. For the first time in my reporting experience, this
extended military family has become fully engaged in the political
process: you see them at gatherings everywhere, from Republican and Tea
Party to independent and goo-goo. And they're no longer sitting in the
back taking notes. They are moving up front and taking leadership
roles. My assessment, for what it's worth, is that these are not summer
soldiers: in the early rounds of the 2012 battle, including Wisconsin
and Iowa, there's been no quit in them.<br>
<br>
What are the members of this uniquely American family saying to each
other and to those who will listen sympathetically? A few general
themes emerge from a few dozen in-depth conversations:<br>
<br>
• There is not a trace of cockiness among today's best and brightest,
but something much closer to wariness. With the U.S. military scaled to
fight two wars, they feel acutely the strain of fighting two-and-a-half
wars simultaneously. They worry about the possibility -- no more than
that just now -- that there could be breakdowns and that they could let
their country down. They will do whatever they are asked to do, that
is, but they may have been asked to do too much.<br>
<br>
• They are primed and poised to defend this country. We are in very
good hands on that score. But they are made uneasy by a mission
creepiness that casts them as the paramilitary arm of the international
welfare state or, even less comfortably, as the enforcement division of
D.C. think tanks.<br>
<br>
• Military families, better than most, understand the basics of forward
planning -- budgets, priorities, discipline. While they brush off the
mindless charges of "isolationism," they wonder quietly if the Fulda
Gap might better be defended by Germans, the 38th parallel by South
Koreans. Most of them think that foreign nations should be built by
other, non-American people and preferably by the people who live there.
In sum, they are utterly loyal to civilian authority, but they are more
measured and considerably less grandiose.<br>
<br>
The story of the extended military family will play out over the months
ahead, first as breathless Exclusive! and then as pensive thumbsucker.
But one thing the extended military family knows for sure (and, in
this, they are miles ahead of both the press and the politicians of
both parties). When it comes to neoconservatism's global agenda, the
question is now closed. We can't afford it.</font>
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