[Peace-discuss] neoconservativism waxing old

["E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"]

...Buehler..?..Buehler...?...Buehler...?

The American Spectator is the usual sounding box of the perpetual 
bensteinish Ben Stein
and is generally rather quasi-neoconnish.

It is interesting to read this attack on the warmongerers.

****

Neoconservatism Interrupted

By Neal B. Freeman on 8.18.11 @ 6:10AM

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/08/18/neoconservatism-interrupted/print

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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?)

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.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.
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