[Peace-discuss] The antiwar right vs the neocon-neoliberal alliance
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Sat Mar 26 10:39:31 CDT 2011
"... the War Party has lost the tea partiers, a group that includes Bartlett,
Lee, Chaffetz, and Justin Amash – who is introducing legislation to defund the
Libyan war. In the absence of a similar protest on the left, these tea partiers
are the most vocal and visible opponents of the Libyan war. Together with Ron
and Rand Paul, they are leading a new generation of conservative Republicans to
do battle with the interventionist consensus that dominates Washington...."
[Note the reference below to Rep. Tim Johnson (R-IL15).]
Conservatives Challenge Obama Over Libya
by Justin Raimondo, March 25, 2011
Poor Daniel Larison. Imagine living in his world, a dark, forbidding universe
where the neocons were never discredited, where the interventionist consensus is
bipartisan and unchallengeable, and only a pitifully small Remnant understands
that there’s nothing conservative about empire-building. Larison, a writer for
The American Conservative – that heroic bastion of anti-interventionist,
proto-libertarian sentiment on the right – spends a great deal of energy
"proving" that the very movement his magazine seeks to build does not, in fact,
exist.
When Rep. Jason Chaffetz started questioning the Afghanistan war, Larison dourly
remarked on the Utah Republican’s probable support for attacking Iran. Now that
Obama has intervened in Libya, Larison is singing the same melancholy tune.
"If ever there were a time for populist American nationalists who can’t stand
Obama and claim to venerate and narrowly interpret the Constitution to protest,
this would be it. Of course, this is not what’s happening. Weigel explains:
"’There are individual Tea Party leaders, like Williams or Rand Paul, who wince
at a military intervention undertaken like this. The Tea Party is libertarian in
plenty of ways. But if it has one defining characteristic, it’s that it’s
nationalist. If there’s a way to remove Gadhafi decades after he aided the
Lockerbie bombers, then that’s more important than a debate over the deep
thoughts of the founders. In a Saturday interview with Fox News, Rep. Allen
West, R-Fla., one of the most popular politicians to win the support of the Tea
Party, explained that his problem with the intervention was about grit, not the
Constitution.’
Continuing his sour-faced griping, Larison concludes:
"… I didn’t expect a great outpouring of antiwar sentiment from Tea
Party-aligned Republicans in Congress, but opposing the Libyan war is a fairly
easy call. It doesn’t require a full embrace of Ron Paul’s foreign policy views.
It just requires some minimal adherence to their professed beliefs. The Libyan
war represents everything Tea Partiers are supposed to dislike about Obama and
Washington, and it should offend their nationalist and constitutionalist
sensibilities. The first real test to see what a "Tea Party foreign policy"
might be is here, and with some honorable exceptions Tea Partiers and the
members of Congress they have supported have proved that they are
indistinguishable from the hawkish interventionists that have dominated the
GOP’s foreign policy thinking for the last decade and more."
With Congress on Spring break, and the war but a few days old, the unfairness of
such a summary judgment was underscored by an "update" published a few hours
after Larison’s original post, noting Sen. Mike Lee’s criticism of the Libyan
adventure as foolhardy and unconstitutional. Others soon joined Lee in making
equally cogent and principled critiques, yet none were noted by Larison, perhaps
because it undermines his view of the anti-interventionist right as a remnant of
an unrecoverable past rather than the wave of the future.
Senators Lee and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) have both come out against the Libyan
intervention, and so has Rep. Chaffetz:
"Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, does not back President Obama’s plan for military
force in Libya. ‘I’ve got real questions for the president,’ he said. ‘I just
don’t believe that you unilaterally use United States’ forces the way that we have.’
"Chaffetz knows the Libyan people have suffered at the hands of dictator Muammar
Gadhafi, but the congressman does not believe U.S. forces should take part in
‘policing’ the globe. ‘No doubt that Gadhafi is one of the world’s bad guys, but
the use of U.S. force raises it to another level,’ he said. He criticized the
president for making his case to the United Nations, rather than to Congress and
the American people.
"After the initial phases of the military action unfold, Chaffetz says, he and
other members of Congress will press the issue. ‘Unless there’s a clear and
present danger to the United States of America, I don’t think you use U.S.
forces in North Africa in what is the equivalent of a civil war,’ he said."
Larison once scoffed at Chaffetz as someone "who cannot be taken seriously," and
yet how seriously can we take a pundit who refuses to see the progress his own
(alleged) cause is making? The reality is that the anti-interventionist
conservative critique that originated in the pages of his very own magazine, The
American Conservative – as well as in the campaigns of Rep. Ron Paul – is
echoing in the halls of Congress. See, for instance, this:
"Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is
calling the decision of President Barack Obama to deploy force again Libya
without first seeking congressional authorization ‘an affront to the Constitution.’
"Bartlett, a Western Maryland Republican, chairs the House Armed Services
subcommittee on tactical air and land forces. In a statement Monday, he said
‘The United States does not have a King’s army.’
"’President Obama’s administration has repeated the mistakes of the Clinton
administration concerning bombing in Kosovo and the George W. Bush
administration concerning invading Iraq by failing to request and obtain from
the U.S. Congress unambiguous prior authorization to use military force against
a country that has not attacked U.S. territory, the U.S. military or U.S.
citizens,’ he said. ‘This is particularly ironic considering then-Senator Obama
campaigned for the Democratic nomination based upon his opposition to President
George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.’
"While Muammar Gadhafi ‘is a tyrant despised throughout the Middle East and
North Africa,’ Bartlett said, and ‘his brutal and merciless attacks against his
own citizens are horrific," it is ‘self-evident’ that the situation in Libya ‘is
not an emergency.’
"’The Obama administration sought and obtained support from both the Arab League
and the United Nations Security Council to authorize military force against
Gadhafi,’ Bartlett said. ‘The Obama administration also had time to organize a
22-nation coalition to implement a no-fly zone with military attacks led by U.S.
Armed Forces against Gadhafi’s forces.
"’Nonetheless, the Obama administration failed to seek approval from the
American people and their elected legislators in the Congress. Failing to obtain
authorization from the U.S. Congress means that President Obama has taken sole
responsibility for the outcome of using U.S. military forces against Gadhafi
onto his shoulders and his administration.’"
Rep. Tim Johnson, Illinois Republican, and a tea party favorite, has this to say:
"Constitutionally, it is indisputable that Congress must be consulted prior to
an act of war unless there is an imminent threat against this country. The
president has not done so. In fact, this is the same man who questioned
President Bush’s constitutional authority to commit troops to war.
"Our country has no business enmeshing itself in another country’s civil unrest.
We were not attacked. Our national security interests are not at stake. It is
the American people, through their elected representatives, who are
constitutionally empowered to take this kind of action. Not the president.
"We have spent $443.5 billion in the war in Afghanistan since 2001. We have
spent $805.6 billion in Iraq in that time. We are already beyond broke for
largely unacceptable reasons, and the president has just added to that dubious
legacy, committing American lives and dollars without our consent and no end
game in sight.
"The first night of this attack, we fired 112 Tomahawk missiles. Each of these
missiles can cost up to $1.5 million. That’s $168 million for one night’s
assault. Estimates to maintain the no-fly zone, depending on how much of the
country we want to dominate, can cost $30 million to $100 million per week. Our
commitment to that goal is to date open-ended."
The conservatives who are speaking out against the Libyan action are not just
angry because the administration went to the UN Security Council instead of the
US Congress to seek authorization, they are also attacking the underlying
policy, the dangerous "responsibility to protect" doctrine. This is explicitly
rejected by Barlett and other conservatives, who note Libya "has not attacked US
territory, the US military, or US citizens."
If this is now the standard, then the War Party has lost the tea partiers, a
group that includes Bartlett, Lee, Chaffetz, and Justin Amash – who is
introducing legislation to defund the Libyan war. In the absence of a similar
protest on the left, these tea partiers are the most vocal and visible opponents
of the Libyan war. Together with Ron and Rand Paul, they are leading a new
generation of conservative Republicans to do battle with the interventionist
consensus that dominates Washington.
A couple of weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald – another writer, like Larison, with whom
I share certain ideological sympathies – wrote a piece on the Tea Party and US
foreign policy that was somewhat sympathetic to the idea that their less
government philosophy leads logically to support for civil liberties on the home
front and anti-interventionism in the foreign policy realm. Yet there was, to be
sure, a certain condescending air that permeated Glenn’s piece, and in the
course of it he remarked that the libertarians and paleoconservatives constitute
small factions "without much political influence." Today, as the main voices of
protest against an unconstitutional and potentially very dangerous war come from
these very elements, while the Democratic "left" (pathetically represented by
the likes of Nancy Pelosi) mindlessly cheerleads this latest empire-building
excursion, there are ample grounds to challenge Greenwald’s appraisal – and
Larison’s.
Indeed, the freshmen tea partiers and Ron Paul supporters aren’t the only ones
questioning the Libya "rescue" operation. Haley Barbour, a pillar of the
Republican establishment of some considerable girth and weight, is not only
asking "What are we doing in Libya?" but is also questioning our ten-year Afghan
crusade, and wondering aloud why we can’t cut our bloated military budget.
Indeed, Tim Pawlenty, the neocons’ favorite GOP presidential candidate (to
date), was quick to attack Barbour for entertaining such heresy.
The "isolationist" (i.e. pro-peace, anti-internationalist) sentiment represented
– albeit unevenly, and inconsistently — by the populist tea party movement is
trickling up to the higher tiers of the Republican party leadership, so that
even House Speaker John Boehner felt compelled to issue a statement questioning
the process if not the policy that led to US involvement in Libya’s civil war.
This "trickle up" process is working slowly, but surely. As the Obama
administration embarks on a course determined in advance by its ideological
premises — a crass self-declared "pragmatism" which amounts to supporting the
status quo unless and until it becomes untenable, and then pursuing whatever
policy will satisfy the dominant factions within his own administration –
Republican opposition is crystallizing. That many Republicans are reacting to
this in a purely partisan manner is irrelevant: some opposition to Obama’s
Libyan adventure may start out as a partisan ploy, but political necessity is
quick to harden into ideological conviction.
Ever since the Kosovo war – indeed, since this web site’s very inception –
Antiwar.com has been plugging away at the conservative pro-war consensus as an
ideological distortion, and pointing to an alternative view which holds that
limited government has to mean limited involvement in the affairs of other
nations. You can’t have a Republic and have an Empire at the same time. You
can’t hope to cut back the power of government if that government must have the
funding and the executive flexibility to send US troops anywhere in the world
without a by your leave either to Congress or to the long-oppressed taxpayers
who are footing the bill.
That message is finally beginning to sink in. No, we aren’t taking exclusive
credit for this sudden awakening: it’s the result of years of work by many
people on many different levels, but Antiwar.com has, indeed, been a major
factor in this remarkable shift, and I don’t mind saying so.
Let David Weigel, the turncoat former Kochtopus employee who smeared Ron Paul as
a "racist," cite the irrelevant Alan West all he wants: he and his newfound
"progressive" buddies have an interest in denying the reality of a new movement
on the right that opposes foreign meddling by the US government as well as
Washington’s meddling with our healthcare. Having defected from Team Red to Team
Blue, Weigel makes a living off the discredited and archaic "left-right"
paradigm, which insists that everyone on the right is a Neanderthalish rube just
itching to get him some Muslim scalps: citing him hardly helps Larison’s case.
The constitutionalist-libertarian movement initially energized by Ron Paul’s
heroic efforts has grown well beyond the organizational confines of Paul’s
Campaign for Liberty and its growing and very active youth section, Young
Americans for Liberty. A broad, grassroots movement has arisen that not only
embraces the economics of freedom long championed by Rep. Paul, but also insists
on the Paulian insight that our foreign policy of global intervention is an
obstacle placed in the path of taking back our old Republic. Their horror at the
presidential supremacism exhibited by President Obama as he goes to war without
a vote in Congress is rooted in a principled opposition to Big Government per
se, and in a recognition that imperialism is inherently hostile to their vision
of a free America.
Larison writes that he’s "still waiting for that new antiwar right." Well, Dan,
the waiting is over. So relax, sit back, and enjoy it.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/03/24/conservatives-challenge-obama-over-libya/
More information about the Peace-discuss
mailing list