----/--------
A Conservative for Kerry
by Scott McConnell
American Conservative | November 8, 2004
amconmag.com
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 cliche 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 pile s 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 conce ived 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
presidencyand 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 (The American Conservative) 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 nave 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. (End Quote)
--------------------/--------------------- |
