[Mb-civic] The American Conservative comes out in full support of John Kerry

[Kevin Walz]

>  Kerry’s the One
>     By Scott McConnell
>     The American Conservative
>
>     November 8, 2004 Issue 
>
>     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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