[Peace-discuss] conservative hit on Bush

[Lisa Chason]

 The American Conservative mag endorsement



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 so ul-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.

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