Oppose the Iraq War? You Must Be a Racist
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Rick Brookhiser is one of the better writers left at National Review. But he’s no less a neoconservative camp follower than, say, Rich Lowry. On his blog (and in his new book), Brookhiser says that Bill Buckley’s opposition to the Iraq War must be ascribed to a touch of racism:
Bill spent much of 2005 and 2006 writing that the Iraq War was lost, over, a bad job. I give instances on p. 232 of Right Time, Right Place, and I could easily have given more. The fact is indisputable. What do we make of it? What I make of it is that it was a major failure of Bill’s judgment, as great as his support for segregation in the 1950s (see pp. 12, 33). I believe the two failures are linked by an indifference, inherited in the first instance, atavistic in the second, to the rights and well being of dark people. 1950s Bill did not care that white people oppressed black people, 2000s Bill did not care that brown people tormented brown people.
How is Brookhiser’s claim here any different from the conventional liberal line that you’re a racist if you oppose affirmative action (for example)? Brookhiser elides the difference between someone who may wish to see a dictator like Saddam toppled but does not believe it is the mission of the United States to go around destroying monsters and someone who doesn’t care at all. This is indistinguishable from the liberal canard that if you don’t support affirmative action, you don’t care about the advancement of blacks. I doubt that Brookhiser accepts that line of argument when it’s applied to quotas, but he’s happy to deploy the same bad reasoning against conservative critics of nation-building abroad. The argument is identical in form to the charges that liberal levy against all opponents of big government: do you not care about the poor if you oppose federal welfare? Do you want the uninsured to die miserably if you don’t support Obamacare?
(Of course, you could also oppose the federalization of civil rights, as Goldwater did, without being a racist, contrary to what Brookhiser and the P.C. left think. Perhaps I give Brookhiser too much credit — he may be less a neocon, even, than a plain-vanilla New York liberal.)
Filed under: Conservatism, War
What is amazing is that people like Brookhiser are willing to argue that Iraq is better off because of the Iraq War, as though Saddam was a demon who possessed the country. Of course, no one is willing to accept that Iraq was once a prosperous middle class nation, and one could live a decent life there if you stayed out of politics.
Maybe by opposing a war that has so far left 100,000 civilians dead (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/) and displaced another 5 million, Mr. Buckley was declaring his LOVE for brown people.
Thanks Daniel for that information. Those of us who didn’t buy/read the book might have a higher opinion of Brookhiser but for this revelation. It’s perplexing to see real talent brought down by opportunism.
Wow. Now that’s a new one…
As I’ve remarked in the past, the thing about Brookhiser is that he’s more or less the only person left at National Review who predates the Lowry era, and so indeed he makes himself useful by being the authority to shoot down whoever rears their head from the past to challenge the new orthodoxy.
As for Buckley’s “racism”, the totally obscured fact of the matter is that Buckley was the more racist than any of the victims of his purges – the John Birch Society always had a solid black contingent, and if anything his patronizing attitude toward the wogs was what led to his embrace of Israel, for standing with European imperialism at its last stand, responsible for so much of his later purges.
I wonder what it’s like to do combat duty in a war that’s no longer on page 1.
I’ve never actually confronted a hard-core progressive/liberal about Obama’s escalation in Afganistan or lack of initiative in Iraq, and it’s been a long time since I bothered arguing with a neocon. I think I’ll give it a try this weekend. I’ll report back if anyone calls me a racist.
One of the smaller flaws in Brookheiser’s thesis is his mis-assesment of Iraqi skin pigmentation.
These are not “brown” people, necessarily. WFB after a long yacht trip was probably darker than many of them.
An excellent post.
How portable this canard is too! From place to place, issue to issue, campaign to campaign. All those heartwarmingly needy black and brown folk throughout the globe, still, living on top or near natural resources or otherwise complicating someone’s idea of national interest, fighting amonst themselves, flirting with the Chinese, whatnot. How very convincing is Mr. Brookheiser’s concern for–ahem–People of Color!
How lucky for them too! How hurt and confused they must be by the old segregationist’s indifference. He would not have sent one soldier to Iraq! Shame.
Piled up naked in pyramids, they were fairly pink.
Looks like Dan’s quite the lucky poker player, having just drawn three Jacks in a row, wot?
Anyone remember when Condoleezza Rice told a convention of black reporters that they of all people should know how wrong it was to assume that democracy couldn’t take hold in Iraq?
I’ll never forget asking a black friend what he thought of that, and his simple and elegant response: “That she learned to bullshit from the master.”
Yes, Condi was never above deploying her Birmingham roots to disorient the hounds. Exploitation in defense of an evil. I defy you to out-ugly that.
As Tom Piatak says, an excellent post by Dan McCarthy.
Letting brown people kill brown people is racist. Killing brown people for “democracy”, that’s just peachy.
Neocons, oh neocons. Thanks for the laughs.
Brookhiser is likeable enough, but he has a thoroughly unoriginal mind, which could be a disadvantage for a pundit.
He’s given his life to National Review and can only take his bearings from the current staff as he did from Buckley in the old days. You or I would probably think that Buckley’s qualms about Iraq did a lot to make up for things like his early support for segregationists, but Brookhiser just can’t shake the dominant ethos at NR.
There’s an undercurrent of revenge in what Brookhiser has writen about Buckley lately. It’s a way of getting back at WFB for dangling the editorship in front of him for years and then revoking the offer. But reading Rick’s book makes one think that Buckley was right about him (that’s also true of “What Would the Founders Do” — there really wasn’t anything there). Brookhiser just doesn’t think for himself or have an interesting take on things. he’s a follower, rather than a leader.
This also indicates just how central Middle Eastern issues are to National Review today. There’s nothing else that Brookhiser would go to such lengths to needle his readers about, and nothing else that the staff is really willing to go out on a limb for.
“I believe the two failures are linked by an indifference, inherited in the first instance, atavistic in the second, to the rights and well being of dark people”
Those rights and well being are theirs alone to maintain. They are not a universal construction that must be at all times upheld. If the “brown people” are oppressing each other that needs to be their concern, not that of an international steward. As Daniel McCarthy recommends, we need to stand aside in the Middle East and, with eyes most watchful, let the impending fitna within Dar el Islam take place.
It’s official, according to two tatooed ladies at the Corner Tavern, not liking anything that Obama has done so far (including escalation in Afganistan) makes me a racist.
Of course it makes you racist! Just being white makes you racist! Haven’t you read Newsweek about all the racist babies?
AL: Brookhiser just can’t shake the dominant ethos at NR.
And not just Brookhiser. If you’ve spent any time at blogs run by ex-NRniks, those attempting regularly to distance themselves from movement-conservative orthodoxies not excepted, you still run hard into a you-can-take-the-boy-out-of-the-womb residual stain of the dyer’s hand: where once bowing cap-in-hand before Dad’s authority sat the throne, the urge to flip him the bird regularly in the form of exhibitionist heart-on-sleeve mea gulpas and ritual shaking of fistfuls of screw-you-Pop defiance plots palace coups; the prospect of quietly packing one’s steamer trunk once the fetid swamp within has been clearly discerned, slipping away by coach in the night to the shores of light where sits a vessel bound for lands undreamed, and saying Goodbye to All That by implication rather than constant shriving would seem to have been ruled off the table. It’s part of the illusion that is conservatism tout court: the fetish for preserving “roots” at all costs, the belief that the proverbial yelling of Stop! athwart history really is possible, the illusion that our fate is one of anything but that of permanent exile in wandering and eternal flux…