The continuing expensive, brutal, illegal and seemingly interminable war in Iraq was the defining issue in the 2006 and portends to be so in 2008 election, as one cause of the fracture of among conservatives, departure of GOP membership in droves, and the cause of the impending November trainwreck. There is another reason for Americans and particularly young people to be concerned. This is not a push-button war fought with unmanned drones and electromechanical technology. This version of Neocon Playstation X demands bodies for its meatgrinder. Do you feel a draft?
It has been pointed out in this forum that neoconservative warmongering is definitely not part of the conservative Republican tradition, and both McCainoids and Obamites scoff and laugh at this notion. There is a a new book supporting this concept. Bill Kauffman, onetime Senate staffer and think tank editor turned essayist and author, who lives in upstate New York has written - Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. This book is the subject of an excellent review by Doug Bandow. Doug Bandow is a Washington-based political writer and policy analyst and Robert A. Taft Fellow with the American Conservative Defense Alliance. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a senior policy analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign. Some excerpts from the book and review follow.
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"[T]here is a long and honorable (if largely hidden) tradition of antiwar thought and action among the American Right. It stretches from ruffle-shirted Federalists who opposed the War of 1812 and civic-minded mugwump critics of the Spanish-American War on up through the Midwestern isolationists who formed the backbone of the pre-World War II America First Committee and the conservative Republicans who voted against U.S. involvement in NATO, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam. And although they are barely audible amid the belligerent clamor of today's shock-and-awe Right, libertarians and old-fashioned traditionalist conservatives are among the sharpest critics of the Iraq War and the imperial project of the Bush Republicans."
..."In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism," explains Kauffman. To them, dissent was "a patriotic imperative." But another commonality was being vilified and worse. He adds: "As the American Firsters discovered, protesting war is a lousy career move. Dissenters are at best calumniated, at worst thrown in jail for standing against foreign wars and the drive thereto."
If today the Right seems a wholly-owned subsidiary of the War Party, the American people are less enthused. Naturally, this worries the elites who believe their role is to initiate wars for other Americans to fight. Observes Kauffman, "Bush Republicans and pro-war Democrats have fretted mightily over recent surveys from the Council on Foreign Relations showing that the American people are reverting to – horrors! – isolationism, which the CFR defines invidiously as a hostility toward foreigners but which I see as a wholesome, pacific, and very American reluctance to intervene in the political and military quarrels of other nations."
Indeed, the essence of nonintervention, however labeled, is that it is not the American purpose to engage in global social engineering. Whether the genesis of that belief is fear of or respect for foreigners really doesn't matter. This reluctance to intervene is the highest form of internationalism. That is, noninterventionists respect other peoples enough to believe that Americans do not have the unilateral right to roam the world killing, maiming, and injuring whoever happens to be Washington's declared enemy of the moment in pursuit of whatever happens to be Washington's declared objective of the moment.
Kauffman appropriately begins with the nation's founders, men whose views on war are dismissed as quaint by most politicians today. For instance, George Mason told the 1788 Virginia convention debating ratification of the U.S. Constitution: "I abominate and detest the idea of a government, where there is a standing army." Notes Kauffman, "His view was not anomalous; militarism was." Imagine that, national politicians opposed to war. But a wariness of military entanglements was a constant of early America. There is, Kauffman observes, George Washington's Farewell Address, which is "as close to an expression of early American political omnifariousness as one might find," a veritable "sacred text among conservative critics of empire." American children typically read it, or parts of it, but how many learn that, as Kauffman writes, "Washington's valedictory amounts to a repudiation of U.S. foreign policy from 1917 to the present"?
Then there was the Mexican-American War (which Thoreau vigourously condemned - r.k.) , a shameless spasm of imperialist war-mongering growing out of a border incident created by the U.S....Kauffman's lauds an obscure Whig politician by the name of Abraham Lincoln who exposed the lies that brought America into the Mexican-American War, as well as a Congregationalist minister, Samuel J. May, who denounced the war from his pulpit....The Spanish-American War and, even worse, the brutal suppression of Filipino freedom fighters – who resisted American imperial rule just like they resisted Spanish imperial rule – moved a step beyond previous conflicts. An estimated 200,000 Filipinos, most of them civilians, died. Kauffman cites Felix Morley: "The deeper result was to make Washington for the first time classifiable as a world capital, governing millions of people overseas as subjects rather than as citizens. The private enslavement of Negroes was ended. The control of alien populations had begun."
....If Woodrow Wilson was liberal, his liberalism was symbolized by the jackboot...
Support for nation-building has come to dominate much of the Right. Even liberal Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) receives right-wing accolades because he supports visiting death and destruction along the Euphrates. But Kauffman points to other conservatives – the traditionalist icon Russell Kirk, for instance, who denounced proponents of "American hegemony." ...Current political heroes include Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), the sole antiwar voice in the Republican presidential race, and Rep. John "Jimmy" Duncan (R-Tenn.), an old line conservative who told Kauffman: "I've become convinced that most of these wars have been brought about because of a desire for money and power and prestige." Duncan, ever gracious to those around him, "is a throwback, a Taft Republican in search of a party of peace and frugality," as well as "a glorious anachronism as a representative of a place and a people," enthuses Kauffman.
Most disastrously, writes Kauffman, "the Republicans in the age of George W. Bush have become a War Party, nothing less and certainly nothing more. Dissident GOP voices are rare and unwelcome echoes." Even more tragic is the fact that the so-called Religious Right has joined the War Party. Notes the waggish Kauffman: "The Christian conservatives who have supplied Bush with an indispensable, almost blasphemously enthusiastic following might consider alternative Christian political traditions," such as that of William Jennings Bryan, "Or, if I am not being too much of an originalist, a biblical fundamentalist, that of Jesus Christ."
Conservatism once was an honorable term, associated with "decentralism, liberty, economy in government, religious faith, family-centeredness, parochialism, smallness," notes Kauffman. But he thunders: "The cockeyed militarism of the Bush administration, and the historical ignorance and cowardice of the subsidized Right that has cheered him on, have poisoned the word conservative. For years, if not wars, to come." Today, he complains, the word conservative "reeks of manslaughter and militarism."
Ain't My America is deeply moving, with its eloquent retelling of the largely lost American tradition of conservatives against war. The loss of that tradition has cost Americans much blood and treasure. In closing this fine volume Kauffman echoes George McGovern, calling us all to rediscover our better nature,: "Come home, America. Reject the empire."
