[Peace-discuss] conservative hit on Bush

[Alfred Kagan]

I have just learned that only 1 of 8 editors of this magazine endorsed Kerry.


At 9:27 AM -0500 10/25/04, Lisa Chason wrote:
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>  The American Conservative mag endorsement
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>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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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu
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