[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

An intriguing analysis of why "conservatives" support a change in 
administrations...MD
Kerry’s the One 
By Scott McConnell
The American Conservative 

November 8, 2004 Issue 


> Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an 
> easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readership. In 
> an effort to deepen our readers’ and our own understanding of the options 
> before us, we’ve asked several of our editors and contributors to make “the 
> conservative case” for their favored candidate. Their pieces, plus Taki’s 
> column closing out this issue, constitute TAC’s endorsement. - The American 
> Conservative Editors 

There is little in John Kerry’s persona or platform that appeals to 
conservatives. The flip-flopper charge - the centerpiece of the Republican campaign 
against Kerry - seems overdone, as Kerry’s contrasting votes are the sort of 
baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you 
all about it.) But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate 
for a future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always deserve 
censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. 
But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his dearth of 
charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challenges from 
within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive initiatives by a 
Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorbed by trying to clean 
up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be constrained by the swollen 
deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee. 
It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To the 
surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important president, and 
in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because 
he is the leader of America’s conservative party, he has become the Left’s 
perfect foil - its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew Rockwell has 
mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II: 
both gained office as a result of family connections, both initiated an 
unnecessary war that shattered their countries’ budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous 
reign of Nicholas II to create an opening for the Bolsheviks. 
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed 
to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism 
for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no 
threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to 
politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit 
to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for 
those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to 
resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and 
turn it into administration policy. Add to this his nation-breaking 
immigration proposal - Bush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any 
job where the wage is so low that an American can’t be found to do it - and 
you have a presidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a 
uniquely noxious cocktail. 
During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush presidency 
has degraded the image of the United States in the world. Of course there has 
always been “anti-Americanism.” After the Second World War many European 
intellectuals argued for a “Third Way” between American-style capitalism and 
Soviet communism, and a generation later Europe’s radicals embraced every ragged “
anti-imperialist” cause that came along. In South America, defiance of “the 
Yanqui” always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these 
sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he 
has made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends, by 
businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never 
before have democratic foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for 
Washington to their own electorates in order to survive in office. The poll 
numbers are shocking. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is 
liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge 
piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable 
view of the United States. It’s the same throughout the Middle East. 
Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy doctrine 
under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants 
if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, but 
the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems 
extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods 
about a foreign government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country 
on the basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American 
president has ever taken before. It is not something that “good” countries do. It 
is the main reason that people all over the world who used to consider the 
United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a 
menace to their own peace and security. 
These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real 
allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmire. More 
tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United 
States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will not only think of the 
American victims but also of the thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians 
killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has 
helped immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists - indeed his 
policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and 
brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take their own revenge. Only 
the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to America’s 
survival as a free country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and 
controlling nuclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries 
to provide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world’s 
most hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help. 
I’ve heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served 
prominently in his father’s administration say that he could not possibly have 
conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he was essentially 
taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to overturn Saddam 
Hussein. Bush’s public performances plainly show him to be a man who has never read 
or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who 
makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the 
information flow to the president, how are various options are presented? 
The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is 
one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight real 
decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took great pains to 
shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the 
U.S. armed forces that contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. 
Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency 
- and it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security Council 
in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to 
the Israeli embassy and another who has written position papers for an Israeli 
Likud Party leader have become key players in the making of American foreign 
policy. 
But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed 
intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents 
within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified support of Israel as 
part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the future kingdom of 
Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in 
the Bush presidency - and President Bush has given not the slightest 
indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell’s departure 
from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever the “neoconian 
candidate.” The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives 
and the Christian Armageddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry 
is elected. 
If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day 
forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Republican 
Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a huge 
soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and 
where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then that more traditional 
conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the 
lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American 
past - and to make that case without a powerful White House pulling in the 
opposite direction. 
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost 
any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based 
on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated 
by American armies - a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of 
global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration 
policies - temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election - are just as 
extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of 
low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all 
about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any 
conservative support. 

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Jump to TO Features for Saturday October 23, 2004                             
         
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