[Peace-discuss] Russell Kirk on neocons

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Russell Kirk was lambasted in 1988 for his wisecrack against US attitude 
toward Israel and the Neocons.

...in foreign policy the Neoconservatives have opposed manfully - or, in 
the case of Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, womanfully - the designs and 
menaces of the Soviet Union. They have been well aware that America is 
not merely opposing a national rival, but (graver peril) combatting an 
armed doctrine - as Burke said of British resistance to the Jacobins two 
centuries ago. Sometimes, true, they have been rash in their schemes of 
action, pursuing a fanciful democratic globalism rather that the 
national interest of the United States; on such occasions I have tended 
to side with those moderate Libertarians who set their faces against 
foreign entanglements. /And not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent 
Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States - 
a position they will have difficulty in maintaining, as matters drift in 
the Levant./ Yet by and large, I think, they have helped to redeem 
America's foreign policy from the confusion into which it fell during 
and after the wars in southeastern Asia. In this they have redressed the 
balance in the conduct of foreign affairs. In a little while, 
nevertheless, I shall utter some misgivings about possible long-run 
consequences of their understanding of America's international 
undertakings...

As for the democratic aspect of this Neoconservative ideology, "the 
Constitution of the United States is not for export," as Dr. Daniel 
Boorstin puts it. To expect that all the world should, and must, adopt 
the peculiar political institutions of the United States - which often 
do not work very well even at home - is to indulge the most unrealistic 
of visions; yet just that seems to be the hope and expectation of many 
Neoconservatives. Such naive doctrine led us into the wars in Indo-China 
- the notion that we could establish or prop up in Vietnam a "democracy" 
that never had existed anywhere in southeastern Asia. Such foreign 
policies are such stuff as dreams are made of; yet they lead to the 
heaps of corpses of men who died in vain. We need to ask ourselves 
whether the Neoconservative architects of international policy are very 
different from the foreign policy advisors who surrounded Lyndon Johnson.

*



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090122/deaa39d0/attachment.html