[Peace-discuss] Anti-interventionism among the Libertarians

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Those of us who think of ourselves as on the Left (as I do) should be talking 
with these people if we want to try to reconstitute an antiwar movement.CGE] 

     Whatever Happened to the Antiwar Movement?
     Posted By Justin Raimondo On October 26, 2010 
     Note: The following is the text of a talk given Oct. 25 
     at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Whatever happened to the antiwar movement?

Remember all those marches, all those placards, those giant puppets and 
loud displays of moral outrage?

It’s vanished! Gone! Evaporated like morning mist!

At one point, millions were marching in the streets in the run-up to the 
invasion of Iraq, people all over the world, and then – nothing! Never in the 
history of politics has a movement retreated faster and more completely – 
but in this case, it was a voluntary retreat, an act of self-abolition.

George W. Bush was the perfect hate object: obtuse, dogmatic in his 
ignorance, and boyishly uninformed, he had all the traits we loved to hate. It 
was easy to feel disdain for a President who seemed way in over his head. 
And his neoconservative advisers were almost caricatures of evil, such as 
Richard Perle, who looks and talks like a cartoon villain: or Donald Rumsfeld, 
whose blustering belligerence was easily parodied, not least of all by himself.

But now there’s a new warmonger in town, a new Caesar who is not quite 
such an easy target. As Medea Benjamin, noted peace activist and founder of 
“Code Pink,” put it:

“We don’t have a very vibrant anti-war movement anymore. The issues have 
not changed very much. … Now we have a surge [in Afghanistan] that we 
would have been furious about under George Bush, yet it’s hard to mobilize 
people under Obama. We have the same anti-war movement and not the 
same passion.”

Indeed, most Americans who were marching in the streets, denouncing what 
they called “Bush’s war,” voted for Barack Obama for President. They 
supported him enthusiastically, a number of the activist types campaigned 
for him, and now that we’re living through what Bob Woodward calls 
“Obama’s Wars,” these former peaceniks have buttoned their lips.

When Obama was elected, the main peace coalition, which called itself United 
for Peace and Justice, congratulated him in a front page article on their web 
site – and then promptly dissolved! Oh, they still claim to oppose the wars 
we are fighting – in theory – but in practice they just aren’t all that interested 
in doing anything about it. And we’re not just talking about the limousine 
liberal set here: hard-line Marxists, who have always been involved in the 
various peace movements, are also going squishy. At a recent “antiwar 
conference” held in Buffalo, New York, which was dominated and largely 
organized by a Trotskyist group known as Socialist Action, the participants 
voted to pour their energy into building the October 2nd pro-Obama 
demonstration recently held in Washington, D.C., which dubbed itself “One 
Nation Working Together.”

Yeah, right, One Nation Working Together for the Democratic Party.

The rally, a left-wing version of the Glenn Beck pray in, was basically a get 
out the vote effort on behalf of the beleaguered Democrats. From the 
platform, speaker after speaker told the rather thin crowd that their moral 
duty was to go out and vote Democrat. That’s the ticket! And what did they 
get in exchange for acting as water boys for the union bureaucrats? Nothing 
– not a single speaker, not a single slogan, not a single antiwar placard 
onstage. Nothing, nada, zilch. There was no official antiwar speaker precisely 
because the rally was organized and controlled by the Obama-crats, who all 
support their commander-in-chief as he wages a war of conquest in 
Afghanistan and extends it into Pakistan. However, the party hacks lost 
control of the stage, at one point, when Harry Belafonte shattered the 
silence.

Charging that “the wars that we wage today in far away lands are immoral, 
unconscionable and unwinnable,” the famous musician delivered a stunning 
denunciation of the war – a moment you can bet was not supposed to 
happen. Belafonte then started railing about how we’re headed for “a 
totalitarian state in America,” which kind of made him seem like a tea partier 
– except that in the next breath he accused the tea party of being the 
“villainous” force behind this sinister trend. Go figure.

According to more than one eye witness, the reception to Belafonte’s antiwar 
message was “muted,” at best. But of course it was. The Democrats don’t 
want to bring up the war issue, because it’s just another reason for their 
base to stay home on Election Day. The only other reference to the military — 
aside from some patriotic comments to the troops — was Jesse Jackson’s call 
to “Cut the military budget.” A few moments out of hours. Big deal.

Speaking of Democrats and Election Day, you have a perfect example right 
here in Michigan of how the Democrats have now become the War Party. A 
look at the web site of congressman John Dingell, another beleaguered 
Democrat who’s in fear of losing his seat, has this to say about the war in 
Afghanistan, and I quote:

“While Congressman Dingell was against the Iraq war from its inception, he 
believes President Obama is rightly focusing on the United States’ daunting 
mission in Afghanistan. Congressman Dingell supports the Obama 
Administration’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by 
30,000, bringing the total to near 100,000, and to begin a responsible 
drawdown in 2011.”

Why was Iraq a bad war, and Afghanistan the good war? We’ve been in 
Afghanistan for going on ten years – and what, if anything, have we 
accomplished? And of course Obama’s extension of the war into Pakistan – a 
country that has nuclear weapons – goes entirely unmentioned. But that’s not 
the worst of it. Dingell’s web site also has the following to say:

“On March 10, 2010, the House considered House Congressional Resolution 
248, a resolution directing the President to remove the United States Armed 
Forces from Afghanistan pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers 
Resolution. Though he voted against bringing the troops home immediately 
as the resolution called for and instead favors President Obama’s plan for a 
responsible troop drawdown, Congressman Dingell was pleased that 
Congress was able to have a full debate in front of the American people on 
our nation’s course in Afghanistan.”

Here is Dingell, congratulating himself on granting us the privilege of having 
a real debate in Congress over the necessity of this costly and futile war – 
and touting his own vote to keep us there. According to him, we ought to be 
grateful that the princes and princesses of Washington even deigned to 
discuss the possibility of getting out. We’re supposed to be content with 
that. Well, guess what – we aren’t!

People like Dingell want to have it both ways: they want to appeal to their 
liberal constituents, who perhaps voted for Obama because of his opposition 
to the Iraq war, and they want to placate the Obama administration, which is 
not only sticking with George W. Bush’s agenda of endless war, but is intent 
on escalating it. We are now fighting a not so secret war in Pakistan, a 
nuclear-armed state with a very shaky government that is supposedly allied 
with us, and yet is accused of trying to undermine us at every turn.

Indeed, according to Bob Woodward’s recent book, Obama’s Wars, the 
presidents of both Pakistan and Afghanistan believe that the US government, 
and not the Taliban or Al Qaeda, is launching terrorist attacks and trying to 
destabilize their governments. Yet we are giving both of these characters 
billions in US tax dollars, and sacrificing the lives of our sons and daughters, 
to rescue their corrupt regimes from a well-deserved oblivion.

Let’s take a look at the strategy the US has developed to fight and win the 
war in Afghanistan: we have a new counterinsurgency strategy that can be 
summed up in three words: “Clear, hold, and build.” The idea is that the 
troops will live “among the people” – among the very people whose country 
they are occupying, and who hate them – and in this way we’ll win “hearts 
and minds.” Well, during the Revolutionary War – our Revolutionary War – the 
redcoats were indeed quartered in American homes: the Brits just came in 
and said: we’re bunking here. The colonists had no choice – just as the 
Afghans have no choice. This is hardly the way to win “hearts and minds.” It 
is, instead, a good way to inflict lots of casualties on your own troops.

What we are doing in Afghanistan is often described as “nation-building.” But 
that’s not quite accurate. I would call it colony-building. No “nation” can be 
built from the outside, by outsiders, funded and defended by allies: however, 
that is precisely how you establish a colony, or a protectorate. What we’re 
doing in the wilds of Central Asia is building an empire – or, rather, adding 
on to our empire, which already extends all over the world.

This empire of bases and protectorates is hugely profitable for politically 
connected corporations, what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military 
industrial complex.” Actually, if you go back and see what Eisenhower 
originally wrote about this, he called it the “military-industrial-congressional 
complex” – because it was Congress, which holds the purse strings, that 
made it all possible. While the armaments industry keeps their pet 
congressmen rolling in dollars, they reap mega-profits in no bid contracts – 
and all to support a foreign policy that is premised on America as the 
policeman of the world.

This role as world policeman is as useful to Democratic party politicians of a 
“liberal” bent, such as President Obama – and John Dingell – as it is to 
ordinary Republican warmongers – and perhaps it is more useful for the 
Democrats. Because military spending is just another “stimulus” package. 
According to the Keynesian geniuses who have run our economy into the 
ground, the only way to fix what they broke is to keep spending. And it 
doesn’t matter, according to them, what we spend the money on: it could be 
building pyramids. It could be a chicken in every pot. It could be simply 
throwing freshly printed dollars out of airplanes. Or it could be a war, one 
that requires the production – and destruction – of lots of planes, tanks, and 
other materials. Think of war as just another “stimulus” program, and you’ve 
got a handle on how a liberal Democrat who ran on his antiwar credentials 
could learn to love perpetual war.

Another arrow in the War Party’s quiver is political correctness: we 
supposedly have a moral obligation to “liberate” the women of Afghanistan 
and the region, to free them to be able to go to school, to free them from 
the harem and the bride price. That recent Time magazine cover with a 
picture of an Afghan woman who’s had her nose cut off was a powerful piece 
of war propaganda – and yet the government that we support in Afghanistan 
is doing exactly the same thing. And the truth of the matter is that even if 
we had a million troops in Afghanistan, we could not change the culture of 
that country. They’ve been doing what they’re doing for thousands of years, 
and no one has been able to tame them – not the British, not the Russians, 
and not us.

So why has the left been silent on the war issue? What happened to the grand 
tradition of Eugene Debs, or the Vietnam war protesters, or Martin Luther 
King who was stalked by the FBI for his key role in building mass opposition 
to the conflict in Southeast Asia?

A couple of reasons. One, the left has long since given up its old time 
populist anti-imperialism in exchange for identity politics. Obama is an 
African-American, and, as far as certain sections of the left are concerned, 
nothing more needs to be said. For them, this is enough. Enough for them to 
overlook quite a lot, including a brutal and immoral war that is draining the 
lifeblood out of us, and indeed draining the resources we need for the very 
social programs liberals say they want at home.

Progressives have made a deal with the devil. And the bargain is this: they’ll 
shut up about murdering innocent Afghan and Pakistani civilians, about US 
assassination squads, and about the wholesale assault on our civil liberties, if 
they can get the goodies they want here at home: more government 
spending, more government employees, and more government period. After 
all, who cares if a lot of foreigners get killed? As long as they get theirs.

The transformation of the American left really is a sad and pathetic process 
to behold, and I’ve been watching it unfold for some time now. You know, 
during the 1960s, the New Left solidarized with the people of the Third 
World, whom they – rightly – saw as victims of US imperialism. Their slogan: 
“Bring the war home!” Today, the unspoken slogan of the left is: Bring the 
bacon home – and to hell with everybody else!

This indifference to the fate of faceless foreigners is today translating into 
open hostility to foreigners: has anybody noticed that the Democrats are now 
emphasizing this anti-foreigner theme as Election Day gets closer? We have 
the President and his minions in the media railing against “foreign money” 
that is supposedly pouring into Republican coffers – with no proof, no 
evidence, just a wild assertion.

And we see that China-bashing has now become another major theme of 
Democrats running for office: back in California, we’re being subjected to 
blizzard of ads accusing Republican Meg Whitman of “shipping OUR jobs to 
China.” Both Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown are running anti-Chinese ads, 
evoking the old image of the Yellow Peril – which is a tradition in California. 
During the 19th century, the labor movement in the Golden State was 
viciously anti-Chinese, and anti-Japanese. There were anti-Chinese riots in 
San Francisco, and the state legislature passed a law forbidding anyone of 
Japanese ancestry from owning land. Boxer and Brown are shamelessly 
appealing to this racist tradition.

A trade war is just one step away from a shooting war – but isn’t it funny that 
they want to take on China. Because without China, which has been buying 
up our debt, the Democrats wouldn’t be able to launch all these spending 
programs. In any conflict with the US, the Chinese don’t have to take out 
Washington – they could take out Wall Street without firing a shot by simply 
dumping all their American securities.

So-called progressives are making their peace with interventionism, and even 
getting quite comfortable with it, because it is quite compatible with their 
philosophy of Big Government. If the US government is the answer to all our 
problems here in America, then why not the world? If the poor and the 
oppressed in this country can be uplifted by the actions of government, then 
why not the whole world?

Our foreign policy of global intervention is the natural outgrowth of 
Washington’s culture of arrogance: the inhabitants of the Imperial City 
believe that they have not only the ability and the right but the moral duty to 
bring order to a chaotic world. Modern warfare, especially the kind of 
counterinsurgency warfare that is now popular with our generals, is nothing 
but social engineering on an international scale.

Let every Afghan have Obamacare! And while we’re at it, let’s bail out the 
Afghan banks.

It’s a long way from the distinguished left-wing tradition of opposition to US 
imperialism. It’s a long way from the anti-draft and antiwar movements of 
the 1960s. On their way into the corridors of power, via the Democratic 
party, the left abandoned its principles and the moral high ground.

Now I’ve spent a lot of time raking the Democrats over the coals, but they, 
after all, are the party in power, at least for the moment. So they are, by 
definition, the War Party. But the Republicans are so far from being innocent 
bystanders, when it comes to the crimes of US imperialism, that the distance 
can only be measured in light years.

The Republican party, which used to stand for limited government and 
avoiding foreign entanglements, was taken over, in the 1980s, by a clique of 
ex-leftist intellectuals and activists: these are the neoconservatives. Now I 
won’t go into a long and detailed historical account of where they came from, 
and where they’ve wound up: this history is well-known. Starting out in the 
Democratic party, the neocons who came to exercise such influence in the 
administration of George W. Bush – such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz 
– started out as aides to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Democrat of 
Washington. Known as the Senator from Boeing, Jackson was a cold war 
liberal who supported the war in Vietnam to the very end. As the party’s base 
began to turn against the war, the neocons grew restless, and finally walked 
out. Some of them secured low level appointments in the Reagan 
administration, especially in and around the newly-created “National 
Endowment for Democracy,” an organization created by the US government in 
order to meddle in the affairs of other nations. According to the neocons, 
democracy had to be “exported” to the rest of the world, just as the Soviets 
had tried to export their system.

This emphasis on foreign policy is what the neocons are all about, and have 
always been all about. The founding fathers of the neoconservative 
movement had been leftists, many were former Trotskyites whose hatred of 
the Soviet Union for “betraying” the revolution had taken over their politics 
and their lives. They lived to see their old enemies, the Stalinists, taken 
down, even if they had to ally with the hated enemy – American capitalism – 
to do it.

Of course, it wasn’t this crudely stated, and certainly the neoconservative 
odyssey from left to right didn’t happen overnight, but that’s what it boiled 
down to: the former communists became the most fervent anti-communists, 
who advocated a relentless war against the Soviet Union. Many of the original 
editors of National Review magazine were ex-communists of one sort or 
another, and didn’t care much about free market economics or the concept 
of limited government. Their main goal was to wage a war of extermination 
against the Soviet Union, and this was the thrust of their politics. Oh, on 
occasion, they would wheel out the gods of the market and offer up a few 
prayers, but this was somewhat half-hearted, because they didn’t know 
much about economics and didn’t much care. The founder of the 
neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol – father to Bill – wrote a book 
entitled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and that about sums up their stance. 
According to the neocons, capitalism was good, as far as it went, but it was 
also inherently corrupting. The affluent society, in their view, made possible 
by capitalism, inevitably gave rise to moral corruption: these were “the 
cultural contradictions of capitalism,” which, they claimed, had to be tamed 
by a strict discipline, lest Americans go soft. And of course they couldn’t be 
allowed to go soft, because in that case they wouldn’t be up for the neocons’ 
main goal and joy in life: war. A war against the Soviet Union, a war to 
establish a worldwide American-led democracy, and, in the end, war for the 
sake of war.

As the neoconservatives took over the conservative movement, it was 
stripped of its former identity almost completely. Whereas conservatism had 
once stood for limited government, the neocons invented a new concept, 
which Fred Barnes, in an article in the neocon house organ, The Weekly 
Standard, called “big government conservatism.” And he didn’t mean it 
sarcastically, but as a positive program, a governing program for 
conservatives who had made their peace with the welfare-warfare state.

In a generation, conservatism was transformed, from a philosophy of limited 
government to a scaled down version of the New Deal: from a foreign policy 
stance that abhorred overseas entanglements and sought to preserve and 
protect American interest first, conservatives became the advocates of 
collective security and global intervention. William F. Buckley made the point 
quite explicitly in a 1956 article published in Commonweal magazine, in 
which he wrote that the “thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet 
Union” imminently threatens American security, and that therefore “We have 
to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a 
defensive war can be waged … except through the instrument of a 
totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.”

Forget about opposition to confiscatory taxation: conservatives, Buckley 
wrote, must become apologists for what he called “The extensive and 
productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist 
foreign policy,” not to mention the “large armies and air forces, atomic 
energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant 
centralization of power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins of it 
all.”

The conservatives of the postwar era had opposed NATO, opposed the 
Marshall Plan, and warned that Truman’s aggressive foreign policy would 
lead to domestic tyranny at home – and when Truman tried to nationalize the 
steel mills, in the name of “national security,” they were proved right. The 
conservatives of the Buckley era became the champions of NATO, the biggest 
advocates of “foreign aid,” and had no objections to domestic tyranny – as 
long as they got to be the tyrants.

Conservatism, in short, had become unrecognizable: it had turned into its 
opposite. Conservatives still paid lip service to the ideas of the free market 
and individual liberty, but this was only for ceremonial purposes and to keep 
the contributions coming in. When they got into power, they promptly 
abandoned their program and their alleged principles, and got in on the 
Washington gravy train, just like their liberal counterparts.

What really underscored the complete bankruptcy of the Buckleyite 
conservative movement was the implosion of the Soviet Union. When the 
Berlin Wall fell, and the Communist empire caved in on itself, they were quite 
taken aback. Over at Commentary magazine, Norman Podhoretz, the crusty 
old neoconservative warhorse, was convinced it was all a game of deception. 
The Communists, he was convinced, were trying to lull us into a false sense 
of security. At the first sign of Western weakness, the Kremlin would regroup 
its forces and catch us off balance.

Instead, the Kremlin fell, and so did the entire ideological rationale for 
neoconservatism. The great enemy was no more – and there was no more 
reason to spend a great deal of our wealth on the biggest military the world 
had ever seen. There was no reason to mount a worldwide ideological battle 
in defense of Western values, nor was there any reason for such pillars of the 
cold war order as NATO. If war is the end all and be all of your ideology, you 
have to have an enemy worthy of the name, but such no longer existed. 
What to do?

Out of power, and drifting, their years spent in the political wilderness during 
the Clinton years were not wasted. The neocons consolidated their hold on 
the Republican party and the institutions of the conservative movement, 
particularly the big foundations that dispensed large cash grants to favored 
scholars and causes. They retired to the academy, bided their time – and at 
last their moment came.

When George W. Bush went to Washington, a great many neoconservatives 
went with him, and took their places in the national security bureaucracy, 
and the upper reaches of the administration. So that when September 11, 
2001, rolled around, they were in place, and ready to move.

They would have invaded Iraq even if 9/11 had never happened, but the 
terrorist attacks made it much easier for them. Indeed, 9/11 gave the 
neocons a new lease on life, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. 
It gave them what they most wanted and needed: a new enemy against whom 
a new ideological and military assault could be launched, with much fanfare 
and at great expense. Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and son of 
Irving, had once threatened to walk out of the Republican party because the 
congressional Republican caucus had nearly suspended funding for the 
Kosovo war. The Republicans, Kristol complained, were in danger of 
becoming “isolationists.” In other words, they had returned to the foreign 
policy of the Founding Fathers, and decided it was time stop meddling where 
we had no business meddling. Unfortunately, Kristol didn’t follow through on 
his promise, and, after 9/11, he would have no more cause to complain.

Eight years of neoconservative rule have brought us to this moment: bogged 
down in two wars in the Middle East, and on the brink of bankruptcy. The 
Bush administration implemented the neoconservative doctrine of “big 
government conservatism” with a vengeance – and the results you see all 
around you. Record deficits, a declining standard of living, a war that will 
wind up costing three TRILLION dollars, according to the Nobel Prize-winning 
economist Joseph Stiglitz, and, in the end, the biggest bailout – and the 
greatest extension of government power – in American history.

And so a war-weary nation turned to Obama – and got more war, as well as 
the onset of an economic downturn that shows no signs of turning around.

Out of the ruins of the defeated GOP a new movement is emerging – the so-
called Tea Party. Focused solely on economic issues, for the most part, the 
Tea Partiers will sooner or later have to face the issue of foreign policy, and 
there are many signs that they are rebelling against the neoconservative 
doctrine of perpetual war. Says John Raese, the Republican candidate for 
Senate in West Virginia:

“If you study Great Britain, which was one of the greatest countries in the 
world for a long time, they lost most of their monetary-most of their 
superpower-because they kept chasing things throughout the world. I’m 
more of a Ronald Reagan Republican than I am a Bush Republican to be up 
front with you. I think we have to take care of our nation, and we have to 
make our nation strong, and you build that nation from within.”

And here is Ken Buck, running for the Senate in Colorado:

"We can’t nation build in Afghanistan, the way we did with the Marshall Plan 
in Germany. It’s a fundamental mistake to assume that a people as backward 
as the Afghans are going to be able to build the industrialized nation and the 
democracy that it takes to be able to achieve what we would consider a 
Western-style democracy. And we have to be realistic about our goals. I 
think we have been there far too long. I think we have to give our troops an 
exit strategy, and get out of there when we can.”

I could cite more such statements, but suffice to say here that many 
grassroots tea party candidates and activists are supporting the anti-
interventionist views that Ron Paul has been putting front and center since 
the very beginning of the tea party rebellion. Conservatives are beginning to 
realize that you can’t have limited government and a policy of unlimited war: 
you can’t have small government and a huge empire; you can’t remain within 
the bounds set by the Constitution and project American military power all 
over the world. It is one or the other.

The conservatives of the 1930s and 1940s understood this: the conservatives 
of today are beginning to relearn that lesson. But libertarians must work to 
bring these lessons home to them, to offer the kind of consistency that alone 
can lead us out of bankruptcy and increasing government control over our 
lives. That’s why I am going around the country speaking to groups like this: 
because we must provide leadership to a mass movement that is growing in 
this country and is seeking to break the chains of Big Government – we must 
show them that the Empire is an albatross hung ’round our necks, and we 
won’t break our chains until we are free of it.

Read more by Justin Raimondo

The Biggest Threat to America – November 4th, 2010
Election 2010: A Disaster for Peace – November 2nd, 2010
War Propaganda on the Taxpayers’ Dime – October 31st, 2010
Anti-Interventionism, Then and Now – October 28th, 2010
Frago 242 – October 24th, 2010
Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com

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