spinline.net: The Blog

Raimondo on David Frum — supposedly ousted from the AEI for his call for conservatives to compromise on healthcare reform — and small-government conservatives:

As for the conservatives, the lesson here is essential and it’s staring them in the face. If they can’t see it quite yet, that’s due to their peculiar ideological blindness when it comes to the question of war and peace. They declaim against Obamacare as “socialism” and decry the advance of Washington’s long shadow over all things great and small, and yet they object not at all to the sort of military socialism that has infected conservative consciousness since the dawn of the cold war.

… Of course Frum wants the Republicans to cave on healthcare, and stop talking about “extremist” ideas like restoring the gold standard (which would eliminate the power of government to impose hidden taxes via inflation), since all he and his fellow neocons care about is war, and more war. In his book, An End to Evil, he and co-author Richard Perle advocated invading virtually every Muslim country on earth, and then some: oh, and we also must be prepared to give up our civil liberties, ditch the Constitution, and hand over power to the National  Security State, which alone can protect us. This is all perfectly consistent with neoconservative ideology, which has always stood for Big Government, albeit a slightly less extravagant version than is called for by the Obama-crats, and the reason for this is simple.

In order to maintain an empire abroad – the issue that is really dear to neocon hearts — we must maintain our bloated Leviathan on the home front: the two go hand in hand. That’s what the “Big Government conservatism” pushed by such neocon outlets as the Weekly Standard was all about: after all, how can we invade every country in the Middle East and impose “democracy” at gunpoint if the federal government is starved for funds and cut back to its proper size?

The tea partiers who cavil that the GOP and the official conservative movement are RINOs and sellouts have no one to blame but themselves and their own inability to see the vital connection between domestic and foreign policy. You can’t fight a war to “democratize” the Middle East without plenty of tax dollars to play around with, nor can you pose as the guardian of order and even liberty in the world without denying your own citizenry the right to enjoy the fruits of their labors. You can’t build an empire on which the sun never sets except on the foundations of a federal government that has the power to plunder its citizens and redistribute American wealth throughout the world. Frum and the neocons love Big Government, because their fondest desire is to increase the geographic spread and influence of that government all around the world, with a network of bases, colonies, protectorates, and economic dependents all financed by the downtrodden and fast disappearing American middle classes, who are being handed the bill.

Yup. As the long as the mass of “conservatives” in this country continues to define the maintenance of the American empire as a conservative ideal (while couched in terms like “defense” and “security”), these continual cable news screaming matches about this or that new domestic program are nothing but kabuki theater.

Plus: my firsthand account of a Tea Party!

Sticking to the Iraq pullout is about the only good thing I can think of that Obama’s done, domestic or foreign policy-wise. But let’s see how it all plays out.  Juan Cole:

But Obama’s biggest practical foreign policy success has been in keeping to his withdrawal timetable in Iraq. Most observers have paid too little attention to this, among his most important decisions. When he became president, his top generals, including Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, reportedly came to him and attempted to convince him to modify the withdrawal timeline adopted by the Iraqi parliament as part of the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated shortly before he took office. They did not want US troops to cease patrolling independently in mid-June 2009. They did not want to get all combat troops out by summer 2010. They wanted to finesse the agreement. Reclassify combat troops under some other heading, they said.

Overturning the SOFA or dragging Washington’s feet about it would have produced rage in Baghdad. It had the potential for undermining the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, and for reinvigorating both Sunni Arab extremists and Shiite radical movements such as the Mahdi Army. It would have made other Arab regimes suspicious of US motives. It would have been a mistake as epochal as the Bush administration’s decision to build up a heavy US military footprint in Afghanistan, which restarted the war there and provoked a major insurgency that continues to this day. In Iraq, a country crawling with armed, nationalistically minded groups and dotted with arms depots, such a move would have been a catastrophe. Obama did the right thing. He overruled his generals and began returning to Iraq its sovereignty.

This issue is important regionally because polling shows that Arab publics say that ending the US military presence in Iraq is the single most important thing the US could do to improve its relations with that region. What they saw as US atrocities in Iraq motivated many of the terrorists active after 2003. Ending the US military role there will bring a sea change. (Only 4% of Arabs say that they are exercised by the issue of Afghanistan, so that is not the same thing in their eyes).

Good stuff up at mises.org from the recent Austrian Scholars Conference.

First, you’ve got Dan McCarthy of AmConMag speaking about American exceptionalism and the Right.

Download Daniel McCarthy at ASC

And then there’s an interesting talk by the historian Marshall DeRosa on the constitutional implications of the bailout, specifically with regard to Article I, Section 10, precluding states from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts” — a power assumed to be denied to the Federal government as well. Needless to say, it’s basically a dead letter now.

Download Marshall DeRosa at ASC

And much more at Mises Media!

Just came across this Sobran column from 2001.

Patriotism is relaxed. Nationalism is rigid. The patriot may loyally defend his country even when he knows it’s wrong; the nationalist has to insist that he defends his country not because it’s his, but because it’s right. As if he would have defended it even if he hadn’t been born to it! The nationalist talks as if he just “happens,” by sheer accident, to have been a native of the greatest country on earth — in contrast to, say, the pitiful Belgian or Brazilian. 

Because the patriot and the nationalist often use the same words, they may not realize that they use those words in very different senses. The American patriot assumes that the nationalist loves this country with an affection like his own, failing to perceive that what the nationalist really loves is an abstraction — “national greatness,” or something like that. The American nationalist, on the other hand, is apt to be suspicious of the patriot, accusing him of insufficient zeal, or even “anti-Americanism.” 

When it comes to war, the patriot realizes that the rest of the world can’t be turned into America, because his America is something specific and particular — the memories and traditions that can no more be transplanted than the mountains and the prairies. He seeks only contentment at home, and he is quick to compromise with an enemy. He wants his country to be just strong enough to defend itself. 

But the nationalist, who identifies America with abstractions like freedom and democracy, may think it’s precisely America’s mission to spread those abstractions around the world — to impose them by force, if necessary. …

And then there’s this craziness…

The NYT: “News Media Feel Limits to Georgia’s Democracy.”

Mr. Saakashvili, a telegenic New York-trained lawyer, came to power in 2004 after a wave of protests known as the Rose Revolution, promising to shed the authoritarianism of the past. But Lincoln A. Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University, contended that Mr. Saakashvili now presided over a “semiauthoritarian” state, while saying that it was the most democratic of the former Soviet states in the region.

“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” he said. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”

… Some critics said the culture of censorship was particularly pronounced during the brief war with Russia in August. They accused the government of obfuscating reality to portray Georgia as both victim and victor.

Is it worth risking nuclear war with Russia to defend these guys? John McCain seems to think so. So be sure to vote for… well, Obama wants to risk nuclear war on behalf of this two-bit thugocracy too. Oh well.

Here’s more from last week’s AmConMag:

As soon as he seized power, Saakashvili’s regime unleashed an orgy of arrests of officials. In the name of that old Communist chestnut, an “anti-corruption campaign,” hundreds were rounded up. For months, Georgians were treated daily to live broadcasts of ministers, officials, and judges being bundled into police cars in the middle of the night. No doubt some Georgians relished the sight of the mighty falling, but many probably feared that one day they might get the 3 a.m. knock on the door themselves.

This was all lapped up by Saakashvili’s cheerleaders in the Western media. The Georgian president has indeed achieved extraordinary success in presenting his fiefdom as a Jeffersonian paradise. This is partly due to Georgia’s use of operatives in Washington, such as John McCain’s foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, and a PR firm in Brussels. But more importantly, it is the result of a virulent form of Western self-delusion. Faced with seemingly intractable domestic problems, in which different political actors have to be balanced, Western states like to indulge in occasional but dangerous flights of foreign-policy escapism. We imagine that we can free subject peoples with our bombs. The image of a victim nation has now become an easy psychological trigger that can be applied indiscriminately to Bosnian Muslims, Iraqis, and now Georgians. These unknown peoples and nations are but a blank screen on which we project our fantasies. Our image of them says much more about us that it does about reality.