The Iraq war is sometimes portrayed as a conservative/liberal issue. It isn’t. Supporters of war and empire come from both political parties and can be found among both liberals and conservatives. The “liberal media” supported the Iraq war with enthusiasm, and in their eagerness to parrot the official line abandoned whatever critical faculties they possessed. The American media were so derelict in their duty during the Iraq war that one watchdog group actually offered a $1,000 reward for any reporter who would ask the administration a challenging question about prewar intelligence. Hillary Clinton was a strong supporter of the war. Following the off-year election in 2006, congressional Democrats, for the most part, revealed themselves once again to be a sorry excuse for an opposition party, continuing to fund the war and refusing to take any bold action.
For much of 2006 and 2007, it looked as if we were in for a repeat performance: propaganda and slogans, parroted by the media, threatened to take us to war yet again.
Then things changed. In December 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate compiled by sixteen agencies of the American intelligence apparatus concluded that Iran had discontinued its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and had not resumed it. Up until the very moment that report was issued, the so-called liberal media had been serving once again as uncritical mouthpieces of administration war propaganda, providing cover for yet another costly and avoidable conflict. This would never happen again, reporters and editorial writers assured us after the Iraq fiasco. Ten minutes later, they were back to their usual collusion with the political establishment.
I had said all along that Iran posed no imminent nuclear threat to us or to her neighbors, and now the intelligence community had confirmed that view—a view anyone who read newspapers outside the United States would have been informed enough to take for granted. The administration’s rhetoric, on the other hand, gave the impression that nothing had changed. And from the administration’s perspective nothing
had
changed, since it had apparently possessed this intelligence report for months, only making it known to the public in early December.
The administration’s awkward efforts to cope with this new information tied it up in logical and rhetorical knots. First, administration officials tried to discredit the report, even though it was one of the most comprehensive intelligence reports on the subject, complete with over a thousand source notes. They then claimed that Iran’s 2003 abandonment of its weapons program—a fact they drew from the supposedly faulty report—showed that American pressure must have worked, since Iran backed off from developing nuclear weapons just as the United States was invading Iraq. Our government must therefore keep up the pressure by means of yet another round of sanctions. Russia and China did not buy this analysis, and once again our isolationists in Washington placed America on a lonely and tenuous platform on the world stage.
As with Iraq, Iran has been asked to perform the logically impossible feat of proving a negative. Iran is presumed guilty until proven innocent because there is no evidence with which to indict. There is still no evidence that Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has ever violated the treaty’s terms—terms which state that Iran is allowed to pursue nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian energy needs. The United States cannot unilaterally change the terms of that treaty, and it is unfair and unwise diplomatically to impose sanctions for no legitimate reason.
Iran, incidentally, may have noticed a pattern: if countries do have a nuclear weapon, they tend to be left alone, or possibly even given a subsidy. If they do not gain such a weapon they find themselves threatened with war. With that kind of foreign policy, what country wouldn’t want to pursue a nuclear weapon? But in fact there is no evidence Iran actually has one, or could have one anytime soon, even if it immediately resumed a weapons program.
Still, when individuals want a war, any pretext will do, so the NIE report does not guarantee that our government will keep its hands off Iran. In the late summer of 2007, with the administration aware that the evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program was on the verge of collapse, President Bush signed an executive order designating Iran’s elite 125,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “terrorist” group, thereby establishing a new pretext for an attack on Iran. Fewer Americans are likely to accept that as a rationale for war than an Iranian nuclear weapon. The National Intelligence Estimate, if not ruling out the possibility of war, will at least make it more difficult to sell.
Neoconservatives, the false conservatives who got us into the Iraq mess and pushed hard for war with Iran, continue to hold their positions of prominence. Why that is so is quite beyond me. Every last prediction they made about the Iraq debacle—e.g., it would be a cakewalk, the cost would be paid by oil revenues, the prospect of sectarian fighting was slim—has been resolutely falsified by events, and yet they continue to grace the pages of major American newspapers and appear regularly on cable television talk shows. Instead of being disgraced, as common sense might lead us to expect, they continue to be exalted for a wisdom they obviously do not possess. I am reminded of George Orwell’s reference to “the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets.”
Meanwhile, where is the exposure for those who favor a noninterventionist foreign policy? These individuals would have avoided the Iraq fiasco altogether. America would be trillions richer over the long term, Iraqi society would not be in shambles, and countless Americans and Iraqis alike would still be alive. Noninterventionists have been entirely vindicated. And yet they do not enjoy the places of prominence that the establishment has bestowed on those who have been consistently wrong, and responsible for carnage and destruction that have destroyed our good name around the world and isolated us more than ever in our history. In fact, they are scarcely to be found at all.
Although you’d never know it by reading the print media or watching television talk shows, we who support the foreign policy of the Founding Fathers hold an honored place in the history of the Republican Party and of the conservative and libertarian movements. The so-called old Right, or original Right, opposed Big Government at home and abroad and considered foreign interventionism to be the other side of the same statist coin as interventionism at home. They recognized that Big Government was no more honest or competent in foreign policy than it was in domestic policy. In both cases it was the same institution, with the same people, operating under the same incentives.
A recent article in
Modern Age
, the conservative journal founded by Russell Kirk, illustrated this point. Felix Morley, for example, was one of the founders of
Human Events
, the oldest conservative weekly in America. In 1957 he wrote an essay called “American Republic or American Empire.” There Morley warned, “We are trying to make a federal republic do an imperial job, without honestly confronting the fact that our traditional institutions are specifically designed to prevent centralization of power. . . . At some time and at some point, however, this fundamental conflict between our institutions and our policies will have to be resolved.”
In
Freedom and Federalism
, Morley quoted Adolf Hitler as saying that “a powerful national government may encroach considerably upon the liberty of individuals as well as of the different States, and assume the responsibility for it, without weakening the Empire Idea, if only every citizen recognizes such measures as means for making his nation greater.” Morley then elaborated on what Hitler meant:
In other words, the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatsoever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort.
The phenomenon Morley describes could not be further removed from the ideas of republican government, which have grown foreign to us after decades of military overstretch.
Russell Kirk was one of the chief founders of American conservatism, and his book
The Conservative Mind
has been one of its most influential texts. And he, too, was suspicious of militarism: he was a critic of high military spending and opposed the Vietnam War, albeit privately. By the 1990s he was an outspoken opponent of his government’s military interventions and was concerned that they were making his country unnecessary enemies. “Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world,” Kirk said in 1991 at the Heritage Foundation. “Now George [H. W.] Bush appears to be emulating those eminent Democrats. . . . In general, Republicans throughout the twentieth century have been advocates of prudence and restraint in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
As for wars for “democracy,” Kirk—being the traditional conservative he was—could hardly take the idea seriously. “Are we to saturation-bomb most of Africa and Asia into righteousness, freedom, and democracy?” Kirk wondered. “And, having accomplished that, however would we ensure persons yet more unrighteous might not rise up instead of the ogres we had swept away? Just that is what happened in the Congo, remember, three decades ago; and nowadays in Zaire, once called the Belgian Congo, we zealously uphold with American funds the dictator Mobutu, more blood-stained than Saddam. And have we forgotten Castro in Cuba?”
In his book
The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft
, which he wrote with James McClellan, Kirk noted his subject’s aversion to war. (Taft was the great exemplar of the old Right in the Senate in the 1940s and 1950s.) “War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. . . . Though he was no theoretical pacifist, he insisted that every other possibility must be exhausted before resort to military action. War would make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal govenrment in debt, break in upon private and public morality.” He went on:
Taft’s prejudice in favor of peace was equaled in strength by his prejudice against empire. Quite as the Romans had acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind, he feared that America might make herself an imperial power with the best of intentions—and the worst of results. He foresaw the grim possibility of American garrisons in distant corners of the world, a vast permanent military establishment, an intolerant “democratism” imposed in the name of the American way of life, neglect of America’s domestic concerns in the pursuit of transoceanic power, squandering of American resources upon amorphous international designs, the decay of liberty at home in proportion as America presumed to govern the world: that is, the “garrison state,” a term he employed more than once. The record of the United States as administrator of territories overseas had not been heartening, and the American constitution made no provision for a widespread and enduring imperial government. Aspiring to redeem the world from all the ills to which flesh is heir, Americans might descend, instead, into a leaden imperial domination and corruption.
Richard Weaver, still another central figure in the history of conservatism and perhaps best known for his book
Ideas Have Consequences
, opposed the atomic bombing of Japan and spoke with contempt of Theodore Roosevelt, who would “strut and bluster and intimidate our weaker neighbors.” Weaver wrote an extraordinary essay on the immorality of total war in his book
Visions of Order
, arguing that “of the many things which cause us to feel that spirit indispensable to civilization has been weakened, none should arouse deeper alarm than total war.”
The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet reminded his audience that war was revolutionary, not conservative. He likewise warned that socialist proposals have often, under wartime conditions, become the law of the land.
These last three figures—Kirk, Weaver, and Nisbet—share something in common. One of the most useful and respected studies of American conservatism, George Nash’s book
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
, identifies these three men as the most important thinkers among what he calls traditionalist conservatives. That means the three most significant traditional conservative intellectuals in the postwar period were all wary of militarism to one degree or another. None were pacifists, naturally, but they all believed that war was something so materially and morally catastrophic that it genuinely had to be considered only a last resort. And since, as Randolph Bourne said, “war is the health of the state,” they also understood the undesirable domestic side effects of war, such as taxes, debt, lost liberties, centralization, and the emasculation of the Constitution.
How does Israel, with which the United States has long enjoyed a special relationship, fit into this picture? I see no reason that our friendship with Israel cannot continue. I favor extending to Israel the same honest friendship that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers urged us to offer to all nations. But that also means no special privileges like foreign aid—a position I maintain vis-à-vis all other countries as well. That means I also favor discontinuing foreign aid to governments that are actual or potential enemies of Israel, which taken together receive much more American aid than Israel does. Giving aid to both sides has understandably made many average Israelis and American Jews conclude that the American government is hypocritically hedging its bets.
I oppose all foreign aid on principle, for reasons I detail in a later chapter. Foreign aid is not only immoral, since it involves the forced transfer of wealth, but it is also counterproductive, as a ceaseless stream of scholarship continues to show. Foreign aid has been a disaster in Africa, delaying sound economic reforms and encouraging wastefulness and statism. We should not wish it on our worst enemy, much less a friend. Moreover, since the aid has to be spent on products made by American corporations, it is really just a form of corporate welfare, which I can never support.