Bush's Crusade

Once again we have to turn to the enemy of much we progressives believe for an articulate criticism of George W. Bush's foreign policy crusade. That enemy is Pat Buchanan who's commentary The Anti-Conservatives in The American Conservative is an excellent critique of Bush's delusional crusade for democracy. He begins with how "real conservatives" feel about the foreign policy adventures of the immature Texas cowboy wannabe.

A conservative knows not whether to laugh or weep, for Mr. Bush has just asserted a right to interfere in the internal affairs of every nation on earth. Why? Because the "survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But this is utterly ahistorical. The world has always been afflicted with despots. Yet America has always been free. And we have remained free by following the counsel of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams and staying out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars.

Did you get that? There have always been tyrants and America has always been free. Iraq was exactly the wrong thing to do to prevent terrorism in the US.

The 9/11 killers were over here because we are over there. We were not attacked because of who we are but because of what we do. It is not our principles they hate. It is our policies. U.S. intervention in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 terror. Bush believes it is the cure. Has he learned nothing from Iraq?

In 2003, we invaded a nation that had not attacked us, did not threaten us, and did not want war with us to disarm it of weapons it did not have. Now, after plunging $200 billion and the lives of 1,400 of our best and bravest into this war and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, we have reaped a harvest of hatred in the Arab world and, according to officials in our own government, have created a new nesting place and training ground for terrorists to replace the one we lately eradicated in Afghanistan.

Yet Bush wants to expand his crusade it appears he has learned nothing. His rhetoric alone inflames those who would do America harm and increases their numbers. The people who have convinced Bush to go down this path of course are the neo-conservatives. Buchanan compares them to the Jacobins of the French Revolution who were such zealots of freedom that they became to believe it was OK to destroy freedom to save it.

America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," said John Quincy Adams, "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." Under the tutelage of Jacobins who call themselves idealists, Bush has repudiated this wise core doctrine of U.S. foreign policy to embrace Wilsonian interventionism in the internal affairs of every autocratic regime on earth. We are going to democratize the world and abolish tyranny.

Giddy with excitement, the neocons are falling all over one another to hail the president. They are not conservatives at all. They are anti-conservatives, and their crusade for democracy will end as did Wilson's, in disillusionment for the president and tragedy for this country.

Of course what Buchanan won't admit is that the real goal of those directing Bush is anything but freedom, it is economic and cultural imperialism.