[BRIGADE] PJB: Onward the Revolution!
Published: Tue, 04/08/08
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Having cheerfully confessed he knows little about economics, John
McCain is advancing himself as a foreign-policy president, a
"realistic idealist," he told the World Affairs Council of Los
Angeles.
But judging from the content of his speech, McCain is no more a
realist than he is a reflective man.
Speaking of our five-year war in Iraq, McCain declares, "It would
be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a
nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign
them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possible
genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature
withdrawal."
Fair point. There is surely a great risk in a too-rapid withdrawal.
But if a U.S. withdrawal, after 4,000 dead and 33,000 wounded, and
a trillion dollars sunk, runs the risk of a genocidal calamity,
what does that tell us about the wisdom of those who marched us
into this war?
What threat did Saddam ever pose comparable to the cataclysm McCain
says we face if we pull out? Who, Senator, put American on the
horns of so horrible a dilemma?
"Whether they were in Iraq before is immaterial," McCain warns,
"al-Qaida is there now." And that is surely true.
But if al-Qaida was not in Iraq before we invaded, why did we
invade? And if al-Qaida is there now, what was the magnet that drew
them in, if not the U.S. occupation McCain himself championed?
Like Condi Rice, who regularly disparages the policies of every
president from FDR to Bill Clinton, McCain enjoys parading the
higher morality of his devotion to democracy-uber-alles.
"For decades in the Middle East we had a strategy of relying upon
autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah,
the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi
royal family. ... We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on
these outdated autocrats is the safest bet."
Speaking of self-delusion, does McCain believe the "democrats"
lately elected in Pakistan will be tougher on al-Qaida and the
Taliban than Pervez Musharraf, who has twice escaped assassination
for having sided with us?
Does McCain think this new crowd in Islamabad will be more
pro-American than the general, when the people who voted them in
are among the most anti-American in the Islamic world?
From Richard Nixon to George Bush I, we expelled Moscow from Egypt,
won the Cold War, brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and
created a worldwide alliance, including Hafez al-Assad of Syria,
that drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait.
What has the Bush-McCain democracy crusade produced, save electoral
victories for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas? And if
we dump the sultan of Oman, President Mubarak, and the king of
Saudi Arabia, who does McCain think will replace them?
If undermining Arab autocrats is good for America, why is that also
the goal of Osama bin Laden?
McCain proposes a "League of Democracies" to unite a hundred
nations for peace and freedom. "Revanchist Russia," however, is to
be black-balled from McCain's league and thrown out of the G-8.
What would this accomplish other than undoing the work of Reagan in
bringing Moscow in from the cold, driving Russia into the arms of
China, restarting the Cold War and recreating the Beijing-Moscow
axis it was Nixon's great achievement to break up?
What McCain is proposing is a re-division of the world into the
forces of light and the forces of darkness. Moral clarity at last!
Has he forgotten the fate of that earlier rabbit warren of the
righteous, the League of Nations?
Does our "realistic idealist" think a NATO of 25 nations that has
mustered a piddling 16,000 soldiers, most of them noncombatants, to
stand beside us in Afghanistan is going to confront a nuclear-armed
Russia?
"Nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Only
permanent interests," said Lord Palmerston.
What is critical, especially in wartime, is not whether a regime is
autocratic or democratic, but whether it is hostile or friendly.
Gen. Washington, at war with democratic Great Britain, is said to
have danced a jig when he heard we had Louis XVI as an ally. During
our Civil War, Britain built blockade-runners for the Confederacy,
while the czar docked his ships in Union harbors. Russia "was our
friend/When the world was our foe," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes.
When Nixon launched his airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur
War, autocratic Portugal let us use the Azores. Democratic France
denied Reagan over-flight permission in the 1986 raid on Libya. Two
brave U.S. pilots died as a result.
When McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton, British and French ships were
unloading goods in Haiphong, while Ferdinand Marcos and the South
Korean generals sent troops to stand with us and fight beside us.
To root one's attitude toward nations based upon their internal
politics rather than their foreign policies is ideology. And
policies rooted in ideologies, from Trotskyism to democratism, end
up on the Great Barrier Reef of reality.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/?p=977
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