RE: Solving Non-Interventionism’s Tough-Guy Problem
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As someone who works in talk radio in the deep red state of South Carolina (we have the highest amount of military personnel per capita), I don’t completely agree with George Hawley about the futility of appealing to the better nature of the talk radio audience, or as he wrote disparagingly “many anti-war conservatives and libertarians expend a great number of keystrokes lamenting the American war machine’s innocent foreign victims.”
I’ve found that when discussing, for example, the estimated 500,000 children killed in Iraq in the 1990’s through bombings and sanctions (the U.N.’s number) or even the thousands upon thousands of civilians killed during Bush’s war, contrasting the death of foreign innocents with 911 does occasionally make some headway. In other words – if the murder of 3,000 innocent civilians in the U.S. on 911 warrants an eternal war against an eternal enemy – then how can we not expect Muslims to adopt the same stance, for the same reason, when their own civilian death toll is significantly higher?
But Hawley’s basic point – that anti-war conservatives would do well to adopt language that distinguishes them from the Left, is correct.
Hawley wrote:
“The neocons spent the last decade smearing their opponents to the Right as delusional or cowardly ‘liberals’ – when they aren’t calling them anti-Semites, that is. They respond to non-interventionist arguments with inanities like, ‘freedom isn’t free,’ and then tell some heartwarming story about a soldier who lost his leg but still supports the war and hopes the American people are ‘tough enough to see it through.’ It is utterly disingenuous for the epicene dweebs who lead the neoconservative movement to sell themselves as authorities on old-fashioned American manliness. They get away with it because, when it comes to speaking Middle America’s language, the neocons are pretty much the only game in town. Although their message is utterly vacuous, the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Levins know exactly how to frame their arguments in a way that appeals to the GOP base. It’s time for more doves on the Right to learn to do the same.”
“It’s time for doves on the Right to learn to do the same,” is exactly right. But in addition to employing Hawley’s “Who-Gives-a-Damn? Conservatism,” (foreign nations and their problems are none of our business) using anti-government, non-interventionist language that might appeal to mainstream conservatives is also useful.
I have been making the argument as of late, that the only difference between big government liberals and “the neocons” or “Bush Republicans” is not how much we should spend – but where we should spend it. In other words, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and the rest of the mainstream Republican pack are not serious fiscal conservatives because they all continue to defend three trillion dollars wasted in Iraq as money well spent. Forget if you were for the war or against it. Pro-Iraq War Republicans primary argument with Obama is not over massive spending. They all agree on massive spending and saddling future generations with massive debt. They just differ on whether the price tag should be attached to foreign or domestic priorities. During the election, a fiscally conservative listener – who had supported the Iraq War – told me he had switched his vote from John McCain to Chuck Baldwin precisely because of this issue.
Another useful argument is looking out for the interest of the troops by always questioning Washington, DC and their real foreign policy intentions. Our brave men and women who serve in uniform should not be put in harm’s way unless it is absolutely necessary. We owe them that. Blind faith in one’s government when it comes to war is not only a disservice to the Founding Fathers’ vision of republican democracy, but a grave disservice to our troops, who deserve better. “Supporting the troops” necessarily means questioning one’s government, not trusting it without question.
While I don’t agree with all of Hawley’s points, he is on the right track. And any attempts to turn the minds of mainstream conservatives away from empire might work best by turning some of talk radio’s contradictory, anti-government language against them.
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Amen Brother Hunter! Like any salesman knows, how soemthing is sold (unfortunately) is often as important as what is being ’sold.’
Keep up the good work. Peace be with you.
Chris
I wanted to comment on this good topic of debate and Hawley, Hunter and Bargainer have all made good arguments.
My viewpoint is that the key is not to go to the extreme of attacking the institution of the military (some paleolibs can be childish on this point, especially when they call for mutinies or fragging of officers) which so many have a stake in but attack those who misuse it, whether they are politicians of the nation-state or the keyboard bombadiers who view the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen as their own personal shock troop rather than real people with real families and dependents or the policies which put such persons in harms way and their poor leadership when war is declared. We must identify with the common military man and say that his interests and needs are not being satisfied either by the politicians or the brass.
The problem with non-interventionism is that, in its own way, it is as extreme a position as that of the neoconservatives. There are times when the national interest demands that we act. In the case of the Neoconservatives, we had a faction guided by pride and ignorance operating in the service of another country.
But the belief as expressed frequently on this site, that intervention is always and everywhere an error is mistaken. Many of the arguments against intervention betray a naive and sentimental longing for a peaceable kingdom among nations that has never existed and never will.
I’m talking more about commenters that posters here. The presence in our ranks of numerous pacifists is a liability in our struggle to keep the neocons on one side, and the left humanitarian interventionists on the other, from entangling us in ill advised escapades abroad. Many on the site elevate George Kennan as a kind of patron saint of nonintervention. But Kennan called for a minimization of all foreign involvement, not the adoption of the Sermon on the Mount as our foreign policy.
O’Meehan hits the nail on the head here. You have to be quite naive to think that in practical circumstances the answer to every foreign policy question is “don’t do anything! stay out of it, it’s not our fight, we’ll only piss them off, blah blah blah”. You can have limited government and a reasonable foreign policy that is able to deal with threats too- many neo-conservatives and pseudo-conservatives alike could care less about socialized medecine, cap and trade, bailouts, stiumuli, and social democracy at home so long as there’s eternal manifest destiny abroad IE John McCain, Ross Douthat, David Frum et al.
I suppose I feel like some people around here would honestly say in a scenario where North Korea gets a nuke and they are planning to bomb Hawaii that we should not hit them first. Forget your hatred of Rush or Hannity or Levin for a second (which is a moot discussion by the way- why not trash Obama or Kennedy or Schumer or the folks at MSNBC?) and really think about that scenario. The contention here is that it is stupid to be anti-interventionist 100% of the time, no exceptions. Realism as per Morgenthau or Kissinger or even George Kennan is perfectly reasonable to inform one’s libertarian philosophy.
Wow, Mr. Meehan….non-interventionism is extreme?? Perhaps you can point to some examples in the past where our ‘extreme non-interventionism’ led to enormous numbers of US dead and dollars spent. Because I sure-as-hell can think of situations where extreme interventionism has done the same, never mind the many innocents who got caught in the crossfire.
The point is that non-interventionism should be our default position, in much the same way liberty, or free markets, or low taxes are our default position. We (conservatives) assume those are the ideals for which we strive for, and to move away from them should require enormous effort on the part of anyone looking to move us from those ideals. This should be true for non-interventionism as well, but as we saw with Iraq, it was not too hard for our leaders to dupe us into that masquerade.
Mr. DeMoss’s point answers a problem that is not posed by non-interventionism. If a fleet of Russian warships were moving towards Boston Harbor, we would have every right to cut them off. Similarly, if we have proof (real proof, not “Saddam has drones coming across the Atlantic” proof) that a nuclear weapon is going to be launched at Honolulu, we have the right to stop it. That’s called ‘premption’ (and not Bush’s ‘preventive’ action) and is firmly recognized under international law.
The first question to consider is, “if we were less interventionist vis-a-vis North Korea, how much interest would they have in aiming a nuclear weapon at Hawaii in the first place?”
Secondarily, isn’t that why we still have XX,000 intercontinental ballistic nukes to rain down on them if they were to try such a thing? That did seem to work pretty well against the USSR, didn’t it?
Peace be with you.
“not the adoption of the Sermon on the Mount as our foreign policy.”
Oh ye of little faith, and so Hobbes rules with the Leviathan.
cfountain72, to abjure intervention altogether, as many here advocate, is an extreme limitation on our freedom of action. Any slavish adherance to a single course of action (or inaction) is by definition, extreme.
You can stop beating that dead Iraqi horse now. That whole enterprise was doomed idiocy from the beginning. But you can’t blame foreign policy realists for it. It was true believers in the opposite side of the non-intervention coin that brought this down upon us.
I take it you believe that North Korea is reacting to our “interventionism” rather than attempting to blackmail the powers into handing over more money and fuel. Our Korean intervention for the past 59 years has consisted entirely in preventing the North from invading the South. The South can defend itself now and perhaps we should leave. Of course if we hadn’t intervened in 1950, there would be no prosperous allied South Korea today.
I envy your innocence.
Mr. Meehan,
I am pleased to hear you would consider leaving the defense of South Korea to the noble South Koreans. The mere fact that this notion is rarely discussed tells us how much we consider intervention practically a birthright.
Yes, North Korea will continue to play the hand they are dealt (or dealt themself.) As long as we have in-theatre troops that they can use as nuclear hostages for blackmail, they will continue to do so.
With respect to Iraq, that horse is unfortunately still very much alive. I still keep hearing influential folks tell us that “well, the invasion was justified, it’s just the execution that was the problem.” It seems pretty obvious to me that this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from that debacle. Talk like that only makes our next Vietnam, errrr, Iraq, a few years away.
Setting aside your patronization, it has little to do with innocence. When the day (year?…century?) comes that we really get too non-interventionist for our own good, I fully expect you to metaphorically ride as Paul Revere did, warning us all to wake up from our innocent slumber. In the mean time we have a long, long way to go to reach that ‘extreme.’
Peace be with you.
“With respect to Iraq, that horse is unfortunately still very much alive. I still keep hearing influential folks tell us that “well, the invasion was justified, it’s just the execution that was the problem.” It seems pretty obvious to me that this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from that debacle. Talk like that only makes our next Vietnam, errrr, Iraq, a few years away.”
Yes, but no one here thinks that way, including me, So what are you on about?
I’m curious about your reference to “Noble” South Koreans. Do you like South Koreans that much, or have they done something to displease you? And you seem unsure about how North Korea got they way it is, as in: “Yes, North Korea will continue to play the hand they are dealt (or dealt themself (sic).)” Have we caused the kleptocracy in Pyongyang to blackmail its neighbors?
Finally, I neither want the US to be more or less interventionist than it should. We should intervene only when our strategic interests are involved and there is no other practical option.