[Peace-discuss] the neocons fight back

[Stuart Levy]

That smoking gun just could be a magic mushroom...

On 9/3/13 9:38 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" wrote:
> The Neocons are out to overturn the tide
> of non-interventionism...
>
> The interests of America...
>
> http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2873/9595462289_59e3645522_m.jpg
>
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324432404579050821624966890.html
>
>
> The Robert Taft Republicans Return
> Isolationism has never served the interests of America, or the GOP.
> BRET STEPHENS
>
> 'We'll be lucky to get 80 Republicans out of 230." That's an astute 
> GOP congressman's best guess for how his caucus now stands on the vote 
> to authorize military force against Syria.
> At town hall meetings in their districts, the congressman reports, 
> House Republicans are hearing "an isolationist message." It's not 
> America's war. The evidence that the Assad regime used chemical 
> weapons is ambiguous, maybe cooked. There isn't a compelling national 
> interest to intervene. "Let Allah sort it out." We'd be coming in on 
> the side of al Qaeda. The strike serves symbolic, not strategic, 
> purposes. There's no endgame. It would be another Iraq.
> Or, to quote Sean Hannity in all his profundity, it would be "the next 
> world war."
>
> There's also the trust issue. "Why should I go out on a limb to help 
> this president?" The /this /in that question, as House Republicans ask 
> it, means Benghazi and Susan Rice 
> <http://topics.wsj.com/person/R/Susan-Rice/7113>, the IRS and Lois 
> Lerner, the NSA and James Clapper. It means a president for whom all 
> policy is partisanship, including the referral to Congress.
>
> "Big move by POTUS," former Obama 
> <http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/Barack-Obama/4328> spinmeister David 
> Axelrod tweeted over the weekend. "Consistent with his principles. 
> Congress is now the dog that caught the car." Thanks, David, for that 
> conciliating image to win over fence-sitting Republicans.
> Most Republicans don't want to become, again, the party of 
> isolationists. Not consciously at any rate. Nearly all of them profess 
> fidelity to a strong military, to Israel's security, to stopping 
> Iran's march to a bomb. And opposition to military intervention in 
> Syria—particularly if it's of the pinprick sort being contemplated by 
> the administration—isn't necessarily proof of isolationist sympathies. 
> Henry Kissinger <http://topics.wsj.com/person/K/Henry-Kissinger/5998> 
> is opposed to intervening in Syria. Henry Kissinger is not, last I 
> checked, an isolationist.
> Yet the Syria debate is also exposing the isolationist worm eating its 
> way through the GOP apple. Thus:
> "The war in Syria has no clear national security connection to the 
> United States and victory by either side will not necessarily bring 
> into power people friendly to the United States." Sen. Rand Paul (R., 
> Ky.).
>
> "I believe the situation in Syria is not an imminent threat to 
> American national security and, therefore, I do not support military 
> intervention. Before taking action, the president should first come 
> present his plan to Congress outlining the approach, cost, objectives 
> and timeline, and get authorization from Congress for his proposal." 
> Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah).
> "When the United States is not under attack, the American people, 
> through our elected representatives, must decide whether we go to 
> war." Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.)
>
> Such faux-constitutional assertions—based on the notion that only 
> direct attacks to the homeland constitute an actionable threat to 
> national security—would have astonished Ronald Reagan, who invaded 
> Grenada in 1983 without consulting a single member of Congress. It 
> would have amazed George H.W. Bush, who gave Congress five hours 
> notice before invading Panama. And it would have flabbergasted the 
> Republican caucus of, say, 2002, which understood it was better to 
> take care of threats over there rather than wait for them to arrive 
> right here.
> Then again, the views of Messrs. Paul, Lee and Amash would have sat 
> well with Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio (1889-1953), son of a president, a 
> man of unimpeachable integrity, high principles, probing 
> intelligence—and unfailing bad judgment.
> A history lesson: In April 1939, the man known as Mr. Republican 
> charged that "every member of the government . . . is ballyhooing the 
> foreign situation, trying to stir up prejudice against this country or 
> that, and at all costs take the minds of the people off their trouble 
> at home." By "this country or that," Taft meant Nazi Germany and 
> Fascist Italy. The invasion of Poland was four months away.
> Another history lesson: After World War II, Republicans under the 
> leadership of Sen. Arthur Vandenberg joined Democrats to support the 
> Truman Doctrine, the creation of NATO, and the Marshall Plan. But not 
> Robert Taft. He opposed NATO as a threat to U.S. sovereignty, a 
> provocation to Russia, and an undue burden on the federal fisc.
> "Can we afford this new project of foreign assistance?" he asked in 
> 1949. "I am as much against Communist aggression as anyone. . . but we 
> can't let them scare us into bankruptcy and the surrender of all 
> liberty, or let them determine our foreign policies." Substitute 
> "Islamist" for "Communist" in that sentence, and you have a Rand Paul 
> speech.
> Which brings us to another isolationist idea: that what we do abroad 
> takes away from what we have, and can spend, at home. When Barack 
> Obama claims, dishonestly, that the cost of foreign wars is guilty of 
> "helping to explode our deficits and constraining our ability to 
> nation-build here at home," he is sounding this theme. So is Mr. Paul 
> when he demagogues against foreign aid by insisting that "while we are 
> trying in vain to nation build across the globe, our nation is 
> crumbling here at home."
>
> Republicans should know that deficits are exploding not because of 
> military spending or foreign aid—as a percentage of GDP, George W. 
> Bush spent less on defense in 2008 than Jimmy Carter did in 1980—but 
> because of the growth of entitlement programs. Republicans should 
> know, too, that investing in global order deters more dangerous 
> would-be aggressors and creates a world congenial to American trade, 
> security and values. One cost-effective way of doing that is making an 
> example of a thug who flouts U.S. warnings and civilized conventions.
> Taft couldn't understand this when it came to the dictators of his 
> day. Neither does Mr. Paul when it comes to the dictators of today. 
> The junior senator from Kentucky may not know it yet, but, 
> intellectually speaking, he's already yesterday's man. Republicans 
> follow him at their peril.
> /Write to bstephens at wsj.com/
>
>
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