Proper Foreign Policy for America
Dr. Bill Smith, Editor: Get your favorite refreshment and digest read this "meat and potatoes" digest by Nelson Heltberg. It is indeed time for the establishment of a "Proper Foreign Policy for America." Gary Varvel's editorial cartoon was added to depict the reality of the present "foreign policy of America."
by Nelson Hultberg, Contributing Author: “What is America’s destiny,” asks Patrick Buchanan? “The answer depends upon another question: How do we see America? As the ‘world’s last superpower’, whose wealth and might must be used to reshape the world in our own image? Or as the land of liberty to be loved and preserved for itself? Is it our duty and destiny to go out into the world to seek monsters to destroy, or do we instead keep before us the Founding Fathers’ goal of defending the peace and freedom of our own country and becoming a light unto the nations? Do we follow the vision of Washington or the temptation of Wilson?”1
When the Founding Fathers formed their Republic in 1787, their view of foreign policy was not to solve the world’s problems; it was to defend our country’s security and survival.
As Professor Thomas G. West tells us, “For the Founders….foreign policy was conceived primarily as defensive….Alliances were to be entered into with the understanding that a self-governing nation must keep itself aloof from the quarrels of other nations, except as needed for national defense. Government had no right to spend the taxes or lives of its own citizens to spread democracy to other nations or to engage in enterprises aiming at imperialistic hegemony.”2
In light of this, we must examine today’s foreign policy that the Democrats and Republicans in Washington have formed. Is it a policy that has our security and survival at heart? Or is it a policy that is driven by the irrational goals of neoconservative factions? Is it America First? Or is it world hegemony dominated? It should be pretty obvious that it is the latter.
The question we must ask is: Are the seeking of world hegemony and the spreading of democracy proper goals for America? The Founders would say: No! Such a foreign policy is misguided and will bring America nothing but oppressive debt, economic decay, and moral vitiation. But in order to understand this we must first understand the major danger that confronts America today – Islamist terrorism and why it has come about.
There are two basic factors that have created Islamist terrorism, and neither of them are well understood by our authorities today. They are 1) the irrational religious worldview of Islam, and 2) Western intervention into Mideast cultures over the centuries. These are not the only motives, but they are the primary motives. Let’s investigate them.
The Metaphysics of Islam
1) When I speak of the “irrational religious worldview of Islam,” I mean the metaphysical views of Islamic theologians and scholars adopted over the centuries beginning a thousand years ago. This came about because of their departure from the Hellenistic emphasis on reason as one of our prime tools to decipher reality, truth, and goodness. Starting around the eleventh century, Islam’s leading intellectuals abandoned man’s capacity for reason as a tool to explain the mysteries and requisites of life. The inexplicable “will of Allah” became the fount of all that happens. Free will was denied. Consequently modernity, built by reason and science, is impossible for Muslims to achieve because Islam rejects what is termed, in the West, man’s God given reason. Life becomes, in the Islamic mind, a predestined stage play that Allah has willed absolutely. The favorite saying, “Inshallah” (If God wills it), is the standard theme of discourse in Mideast countries. Natural law perceived by reason is dismissed. Cause and effect are illusions. All human actions and all of life’s events are a product of Allah’s will.
This rejection of reason in metaphysical matters has doomed Islamic culture to perpetual backwardness with no hope to achieve civilizational progress. Robert R. Reilly explains this tragedy in his provocative book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. From this cultural backwardness has sprung a pervasive bitterness and humiliation among many Muslims, which in turn has spawned “Islamism,” which is the radical sector of the Islamic religion. It dreams of reviving jihad and world conquest in somewhat the same manner that Hitler preached the glory of Germanic conquest over Europe as a salve for the humiliating defeat of Germany in World War I. But it is very important to note that Islamism is just the fundamentalist part of Islam. As Reilly points out, most Muslims “find terrorism morally repugnant and alien to Islam’s core teachings.”3
But Islamist terrorism still has a dreadful appeal to growing cults of bitter minds conditioned from birth to believe that “reason” is impotent and “will” (with its concomitant of force) all-important. Hatred of the West then is primarily Islamist hatred. All Muslims disapprove of the Western way of life because of its emphatic materialism, but the virulence of Islamism does not contaminate the majority of them. These, then, are the philosophical roots of Muslim hatred of the West.
Thus it can be safely said that Islam is a religion that has some severe structural flaws, and these flaws create a definite danger to America and other Western nations. How to confront this danger is one of the crucial questions of proper foreign policy. Before tackling it, however, we must first look into the second factor creating Islamist terrorism: European and American intervention into Mideast countries over many centuries.
Sticking Pins In Rattlesnakes
2) One of the most fundamental lessons of foreign policy that all traditional statesmen and military planners have understood for thousands of years is “blowback.” As Richard Maybury points out in his book, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, America has been “sticking pins in rattlesnakes” for decades in the Mideast, and European nations have been engaged in such behavior for centuries. If a country persists in this kind of irrationality, it will eventually get bit in a venomous manner. Manipulatory interventions eventually have nasty consequences.
Unfortunately, such interventions have created in the Muslim mind an intense hatred of those Western nations that intrude into their cultures. These interventions become a very irritating political salt rubbed into the Islamic nations’ subconscious “self-hatred” and “humiliation,” which has been brought about by their own philosophical and cultural impotence.
Unless a better understanding of this hatred of America and Europe by Mideast rattlesnakes is achieved in Washington political circles, atrocities committed against our country from Islamic terrorist groups will continue to escalate for decades into the future.
Islamic hatred of America is only about 65 years old as Maybury’s brilliant little book shows us. But Islamic hatred for European nations goes back 900 years to the Crusades (1095 A.D. – 1300 A.D.) when Europeans systematically pillaged and destroyed Muslim communities. In return the Muslims were certainly no angels.Thus ever since the 12th century, Europeans and Muslims have been clashing over religion, politics, and colonial conquest – especially so during the past 300 years in which the European nations, with their superior technology, have usually dominated the more primitive Muslim countries. They have occupied their lands and manipulated their people with puppet governments placed in power to favor European interests. This has understandably led to much resentment among Muslims.4
“Not since the Middle Ages,” writes Maybury, “have Moslem armies threatened an invasion of Europe, but since that time there has hardly been any five-year period in which European troops have not been under arms on Moslem soil.”5
In the aftermath of World War I, European nations began to phase out of the Mideast because colonialism became too much of a burden to maintain. But into the vacuum leaped the new world power, America, to pursue the discoveries of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. This was not the blatant colonialism of the past that Europe had partaken in, but rather “voluntary economic involvement” that started justifiably. In the aftermath of World War II, however, it erupted into “coercive political intervention” when the Truman administration, in conjunction with the U.N., rammed through the 1948 partition of Palestine.
America was now involved in the Mideast in a very hubristic manner that was no longer merely economic (and thus justifiable). America’s presence was now political and coercive, and Muslims have not forgotten it. To compound the problem, America then began much heavier manipulative political interventions for various fascist satrapies in the region with billions in aid, weapons, and technical support that continue to this day. In the eyes of the Islamic people, our interventions, our military / bureaucratic presence, and our shoring up of the regimes that tyrannize their lives make us the Great Satan.
The sources of Islamist terrorism are, of course, many faceted. But there are always one or two primary factors in any cause and effect relationship; and the two primary factors that have caused Islamist terrorism are 1) Islam’s metaphysical irrationality and 2) the West’s constant meddling in Mideast affairs.
To the extent that fundamentalist Islamic theologians have gained sway with their cultures’ intelligentsia over the centuries, they have kept the Mideast in backward status. But our role in America cannot be to save misguided cultures from their primitiveness with the butt ends of our rifles. Our role should be one of benign neglect; simply leave them alone. If they want to wallow in cultural idiocy and economic stagnancy, so be it. Our role should be to lead the world to rationality and prosperity through the shining light of example. Let us restore the vision of the Founders and demonstrate to the world, as we did from 1787 to 1913, what a truly free country is like.
Contesting Neoconservative Arrogance
Because of our establishment intellectuals’ failure to grasp the two root causes of fundamentalist Islam’s hatreds, our nation has been plunged into twelve years of suicidal overextension in the foreign policy arena.
The Iraqi war was launched by the “neoconservative” George Bush administration because it was supposed to be necessary in order to defend our country against the terrorist threat that arose from the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. In the minds of many American patriots and military personnel, however, the war in Iraq was not necessary to fight terrorism. Moreover its cost, in both spirit and material, weighed on our decaying society in irreparable ways.
As General Douglas MacArthur warned President Kennedy to stay out of a guerrilla war in Indochina,6 so too should America stay out of such wars in the Mideast. Winning a guerrilla war on the guerrillas’ home territory requires devastating the indigenous population and then occupying the country for decades with authoritarian methods. This is not the American way; it is the way of imperialists.
MacArthur was one of our greatest, most daring generals. He was a consummate patriot who well understood the necessity to go to war when it was forced upon us. But he also understood the dangers of the 20th century Leviathan and its manipulation of its citizens to justify war.
In 1957, perhaps anticipating Vietnam, MacArthur warned that, “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.”7
General MacArthur was speaking 57 years ago, but does not his warning fit today’s statists who revel in stampeding the people with constant threats about terrible evils abroad? The names and events change downthrough the centuries, but the ploys of Lord Acton’s power lusters remain the same. They continue to spur well-meaning men to war fever with “the cry of grave national emergency.”
Today’s guerrilla wars in the Mideast are no different in principle than the one MacArthur cautioned us about in Indochina. They must bog our nation and fighting troops down for decades into the future, which America is not prepared to do.
Iraqi Consequences of Neoconservatism
Because of this, what has been the actual result of our war in Iraq? After a decade of fighting, political wrangling, thousands of deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars expended, we conned ourselves into believing that Islamic theocrats were eager for American style government. Thus all we had to do was dispense Jeffersonian lectures to them, accompanied by several years of political counseling, and Iraq would become a “wise and modern democracy” in the Mideast.
After ten years of this self-delusion, we ended up declaring victory and pulling out of Iraq, claiming our goal of bending the population to Western values had been accomplished. But it didn’t take long before infighting commenced among the tribes that populate the region. Like all shrewd guerrillas, the Shiite, Sunni, and Wahabbi extremists played a waiting game until the ravages of war and the difficulties of foreign occupation eroded Washington’s desire to remain in the country. With the rise of ISIS, the natural “tribalism” of the Mideast is returning to create chaos and undo what democratic forms have been constructed.
This was foreseen by numerous perceptive students of history and Mideast culture. Muslim tribes have been fighting among themselves for 1400 years, and American political philosophy is not going to eliminate the hostilities they hold for each other, nor will it change their theocratic antagonism toward democracy and individual rights. The political forms that we manage to erect will eventually be junked by the tribal mentalities that dominate Islam. The only way to avert this is to become a permanent occupational force and engage in “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” as George Orwell put it.
Our statists in Washington are bewildered by the difficulty in getting Muslims to be enthusiastic about democracy and an American style Constitution. But as Richard Maybury points out, Muslims have their own Constitution. It’s the Koran, and it has ruled them for over a millennium. Yet our solons imagine that they can overturn 1400 years of metaphysical tradition with guns and gung-ho American lectures.
This is embarrassingly naïve. Change in a culture’s metaphysical views takes place over centuries, not years. It moves like a glacier sliding across a continent. And it does not respond to the butt end of a rifle. Our hubris has already cost us over a trillion dollars and thousands of lives on the battlefield in this Mideast cauldron, as well as untold lives lost morale-wise on the home front as our economy slouches toward bankruptcy (and our culture toward Gomorrah) because of our government’s reckless reaching beyond its financial and spiritual supply lines. Great nations fall precisely because of this kind of blindness, this kind of senseless waste and inhumanity that the Bushes and Obamas of history so callously heap upon their fellowman.
Hard Questions for Americans
Just as important as the practical and strategic irrationalities of Washington’s invasion of Iraq was the overall moral inadequacy of our position. The following questions need to be considered by all of us regarding the Iraqi war and any possible return of our troops:
What if Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia were one country called Persia, and it was a sophisticated world power? How would we like it if this Persian superpower was constantly intervening into our affairs to guarantee a steady supply of our wheat and corn by shoring up political dictatorships in several of our states with loans and weapons?
Is this not what America has done in the Mideast during the past 65 years by shoring up the Shah of Iran and his ruthless secret police, by shoring up the House of Saud which lives in Marie Antoinette style while dispensing crumbs to its people, and by shoring up several smaller satrapies in the region? Is this not what we have done to guarantee a steady supply of Mideast oil?
How would we like it if this Islamic superpower, Persia, had pressured the United Nations into partitioning our east coast states into two sections – one for blacks and one for whites – giving New York, Massachusetts, and the northeast to Jesse Jackson to rule as he sees fit, and in the process, uprooting hundreds of thousands of families and their property? Is this not what America and the U.N. did in 1948 in Palestine with its major ethnic groups?
How would we like it if Persia was building military bases in and around America over several decades to maintain vigilance over our affairs and help protect Jesse Jackson and his newly partitioned country? Is this not what America has done for several decades in the Mideast in regards to Israel?
How would we like it if Persia did not wish for Washington to build up its defense forces, and thus began an eight year bombing campaign upon our country that killed hundreds of thousands of American women and children? Is this not what America did to Iraq from 1992 to 2000? Sure, Iraq was ruled by a ruthless tyrant, but where in the Constitution does it say our foreign policy is to rid the world of ruthless tyrants?
How would we like it if Persia was using its privilege of possessing the world’s reserve currency to export its domestic inflation into our country? How would we like it if Persia’s Islamic corporations and bureaucrats continually patrolled Washington in their white turbans and robes attempting to sway our politicians into doing their bidding? Is this not what America has been doing in the Mideast over the past several decades?
Listen to Our Ablest Generals
We correctly retaliated to 9/11 with a blitzkrieg of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But history will surely show that we made a tragic mistake by pressing our bet and invading Iraq. General Norman Schwarzkopf rightly warned George Bush Sr. not to go into Iraq in Gulf War I. It is a “tar pit” of insanity and virulence, and has been this way for centuries. “Don’t fight with these troglodytes,” was the advice of the ablest military men. You’ll just get bogged down in a grisly guerrilla war that is not genuinely winnable without authoritarian occupation. Bush Sr. wisely listened to Schwarzkopf as did President Kennedy to MacArthur in the early 1960s. JFK was in the process of pulling out of Vietnam when he was assassinated.8
Authoritarian occupations violate one of the most important principles of traditional foreign policy wisdom learned over the centuries: Better, freer nations do not invade less free nations just because they are primitive and tyrannical to their people. The job of correct foreign policy is to protect our nation’s security and survival while exercising extreme prudence in taking on the onus of war. We need to listen to our ablest generals with hard-fought field experience, rather than career politicians who wish to manipulate the military for their personal aggrandizement.
If we continue to pursue hegemony in the Mideast, we will destroy the last vestiges of freedom and financial solvency we as a nation have left. Washington’s neoconservatism is driving us into the role of a dying empire. Its PNAC doctrine of “benevolent global hegemony” is in reality “militaristic global hegemony.” Formulated by Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz in the 1990s, it is apparently now Washington’s permanent plan for world governance. Both Democrats and Republicans are comfortable with its advocacy. But this is what imperialists advocate; and it is what brings on their death throes. It happened to Rome. It happened to the Ottoman Turks. It happened to Napoleon. It happened to Britain. Is this what America now stands for?
In view of General MacArthur’s warning about stampeding Americans into war, what would he be saying about the Democrats and Republicans today? Would he not be thundering out a vehement condemnation of their pundits and politicians who are so eager to send young boys off to fight for dubious goals? In MacArthur’s mind, wars must always be fought judiciously after much consideration, never indiscriminately and hastily as our politicians are doing today. War is the most abominable of human endeavors. To entrust its ready execution to those behind mahogany desks in Washington, who have never put boots on the ground, is fraught with danger.
The Root Causes and How to Confront Them
The establishment explanation for Islamic hatred that the George Bush administration put forth is: “They hate us because of our freedom.” As we can now see, this is shallow and unacceptable. The real causes of Muslim hatred are philosophical (Islamic self-hatred spawned by metaphysical irrationality) and political (American interventionism).
Democrats and Republicans are guilty of simplification in attributing Islamist terrorism solely to Islamic fundamentalism’s rise in Mideast culture. It is the combination of Islamic fundamentalism with our interventionism that has brought today’s terrorism about. This is a two-part problem. Without American intervention, Islamic fundamentalism would never have swollen to become the curse that it is.
To come to grips with this will entail opening up our minds and seeing both sides of the Islamic-Western clash. People who cannot see both sides of human conflict are doomed to being blindsided throughout their lives. Such short-range mentalities always bring disaster when they assume the leadership of great countries.
Thus Islamist terrorism is a much deeper and more complex problem than what Democrats and Republicans view it as. It is going to require a much more sophisticated approach than just military retaliation against its perpetrators. It is going to require an ideological metamorphosis in our foreign policy. A new conservative paradigm must capture the minds of our statesmen that respects the inherited wisdom of history and the rights of man.
The place to begin is with the first of our Presidents, George Washington, from his Farewell Address: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world ….Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”9
Does it need to be said for modern pundits that Washington was one of our ablest generals and a true patriot? If he were alive today he would tell us that reason and prudence dictate to us that foreign nations are best left alone even when their rulers are primitive and pathological, in fact especially then. Islamic nations must be allowed to work out their own destiny even if they choose backward theocracies over enlightened democracy.
This is not an advocacy of isolationism. As Patrick Buchanan points out in A Republic, Not An Empire, isolationism is a smear term used to defeat a sane policy of America First and drag us into a globalist agenda that destroys our sovereignty. America has never been an isolationist nation, and it should never be one.10
“The message of Washington’s Farewell Address was not to isolate America from Europe,” says Buchanan, “but to keep it independent of Europe. Stay out of foreign wars, Washington admonished….Avoid ‘permanent alliances’; devote your energies to our own country. Independence, not isolation, is the American tradition.” 11
A policy of national independence is what we as American patriots desperately need to restore, where we look after our own, where we fight in retaliation when our security and survival are at stake. But we do not go abroad in search of despots to bring down. We do not intervene in other nation’s affairs to alter their cultures, rearrange their borders, and browbeat them into democratic institutions. The “benevolent global hegemony” of neoconservative doctrine should be just as repugnant to Americans as all other policies of conquest down through history from Pax Romana, to Pax Britannica, to Nazi Germany’s seeking of “lebensraum.”
A Proper Retaliation
Our solution to the 9/11 WTC attack should have been very powerful and very simple. We started out correctly by attacking the Taliban; but then Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, made the decision to expand the war to Iraq.
“In the Afghan phase of this war,” Buchanan tells us, “we had the support of the world and the acquiescence of Arab and Islamic governments. But when we invaded Iraq, we played into bin Laden’s hand. The Arab and Islamic world turned hostile, for they could not see the link between the Saudis who attacked us and the Iraqis we were attacking. And just as the appearance of Suleiman at the gates of Vienna united the quarrelsome Christian kings against the Turk, so the appearance of Bush in Baghdad united Islam against America.”12
What is crucial to grasp is that we did not need to invade Iraq to fight terrorism and respond to the WTC attack, and thus properly defend America. Nor do we need to maintain a powerful military and bureaucratic presence throughout the Mideast. There are three important strategic actions that we should have implemented.
First, we should have swiftly invaded Afghanistan. This was justified because the Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden with full knowledge of his past crimes and attack upon the WTC, yet refused to relinquish him.13 They were accessories and just as guilty under the legal principles that sustain civilization. The fact that collateral damage occurs is unavoidable. Our attacks, being retaliatory, were justified. Bin Laden and the Taliban were the initiators and thus the cause of any collateral deaths, as all initiators in war are.
Second, when bin Laden escaped into Pakistan, our remaining efforts should have been clandestine, commando-oriented espionage in the manner of the Israelis’ pursuit of Adolf Eichmann. Our goal should have been to track down bin Laden by use of every espionage resource we had in our arsenal, rather than large-scale troop occupation and political reorientation of Afghanistan’s mountainous, tribal culture. Eliminating the Taliban without permanent occupation of the country is the height of neoconservative naivety. And establishing a democracy for Afghans will be no different than it has been in Iraq – an ultimate failure. If this approach had been followed, bin Laden would have been captured much sooner than he was.
Once bin Laden was killed, we should have announced to the Islamic nations that we would pull our military and support personnel out of all Mideast countries that did not want us and reappraise our position in those that did on a case by case basis. In addition we would phase out grants of aid and weapons to all Mideast nations including Israel (but would come to the aid of Israel if Arab nations attack her). We would leave Arab nations alone, and we fully expected them to leave us alone. If there were any future attacks upon our shores from terrorists connected to their nations, then in the words of Arnold Schwarzenneger, “We’ll be back, baby!”
Our need to protect our “oil interests” would be done through diplomacy and trade. Oil is the “property of its owners” and needs to be treated economically by the marketplace rather than militarily by troops and bureaucrats.
Third, we should have made a very important additional announcement by sending envoys from our State Department to every one of the Mideast nations to meet with their rulers. In these private meetings, we should have made it very clear that if, in the future, we had to retaliate against their country for fomenting and harboring terrorists involved in bombings of America, then we would not just attack their country and its infrastructure as we had done to the Taliban, we would rain a shower of smart bombs down upon the private residence and family of the ruler himself. We would do what Ronald Reagan did to the Libyan ruler Qadaffi and his family palace. And we wouldn’t do it sporadically. We would do it relentlessly until the ruler himself was dead.
After Reagan slapped Qadaffi with a bit of Yankee retaliation for his barbarism and effrontery in the late 1980s, good old Muammar developed a different attitude, did he not? Would not other Mideast rulers react in like manner? Would they not begin to police their own terrorists domestically to make sure they do not plan any more American attacks? Would they not readily relinquish any and all terrorists involved in attacks on America to American authorities promptly? As a consequence we would not have to be anchored in their lands losing thousands of brave soldiers in the process.
“Terrorism is the price of empire,” says Buchanan. “If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire. Strategic disengagement is not a strategy of defeat but a recognition of reality. The Islamic world, roiled by its own tribal, religious, and national struggles, must work out its own destiny….
“Time is on our side in this struggle, for Islamic radicals cannot build great nations nor solve the problems of modernity. The only problem of Islamic peoples these extremists can help them solve is the problem of America’s massive presence. Remove that root cause of this war, and Arab and Islamic peoples will see no longer through a glass darkly, but face to face, who their true enemies are.”14
Thus we did not need to invade Iraq to handle the terrorist problem. Our efforts should have been solely in Afghanistan and geared toward ferreting out bin Laden rather than “nation building.” Our present approach is tragically self-defeating; but this is the level of historical acumen and strategic creativity possessed by today’s establishment pundits and politicians. The world of politics always has its unimaginative bullies who revel in the use of brute force because they possess no moral compass to guide them and because they can’t generate the necessary cerebration to fashion wiser, less destructive strategies of defense. Unfortunately modern day Washington is now a hotbed for such people.
The problem of Islamist terrorism is basically a problem of prohibiting its infiltration of our country because that is the only way terrorists can hurt us. They have no military power that can reach our shores as a threat. But this view will take strong immigration reform to end the present “open border” policies of the Democrats and Republicans. This means shutting most Muslims out as immigrants and returning to the pre-1965 Immigration Accords – then setting an example to the world by building a free country here at home. Eventually modernist Muslims would emulate our economic system over the decades. The fundamentalist Muslims would be left to stagnate in their own ignorance.
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
If we as a country do not bring ourselves to confront the Democrat-Republican insanity of seeking hegemony in the Mideast, our fate will be no different than that of Britain and the Soviet Union before us. As the British found out in Afghanistan and the Sudan in the 19th century and then later in Palestine between 1918-1948, and as the Russians found out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Mideast is a swamp of ungovernable tribal factions, long standing ethnic hatreds, and barbaric religious squabbles. It has been this way for thousands of years.15 If we persist in attempting to establish hegemony over this region, we will have to become an occupying military force. This can do nothing but hasten the bankruptcy of our nation.
It is true that no great country should ever be concerned with whether it is loved by the rest of the world. But a great country must always be willing to objectively examine its policies, both past and present, to be sure it is not creating its enemies itself through ignorance and arrogance.
There is no more lethal combination of flaws for a man to possess than ignorance and arrogance. Those intellects who have studied history and grasp the flawed nature of man realize this. We see the hubristic tendencies of man throughout the centuries and long for leaders desirous of leaving people alone to seek their own destiny. We fear greatly the dreadful consequences of allowing ignorant and arrogant men to occupy the White House. We know that the tyrannical, bully mentalities of existence will always be with us in some capacity or another. But we also know that Washington and Jefferson wisely warned us to never let our destiny be controlled by such crude amoralists in positions of political power.
To be a country in pursuit of empire is pragmatically unworkable, for it bankrupts all those who attempt it. But more importantly it is morally reprehensible, for it violates the “rights of man” – the very creed that spawned our nation.
We are not a country of empire; we are a country of peace and individual freedom. “So let us set about creating a new impenetrable shield for the Republic,” as Buchanan advises, “crafting a new foreign policy rooted in the national interest, so America may pass through the turbulent decades before us, serene and secure, and men will look back, one hundred years hence, and say, that, yes, the twenty-first century, too, was an American Century.”16
This will require brave, moral men and women who are willing to stand up to the liberals and neoconservatives to reject their globalist agenda. We are a unique nation with a destiny to fulfill. It is to show the world what freedom is and how it is to be preserved, which cannot be done if we merge our sovereignty into World Government. And it cannot be done if we are browbeating backward people into submission to democracy with the butt ends of our rifles. We are a sovereign Republic, and we must never let that ideal die.
Notes
1. Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, Reclaiming America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), pp. 389-390.
2. Thomas G. West, "The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics," Heritage Foundation, July 18, 2007, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/fp12.cfm.
3. Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011, p. 192.
4. Richard J. Maybury, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast (Placerville, CA: Bluestocking Press, 1999), pp. 66-84.
5. Ibid., p. 70. From Godfrey Jansen, quoted in Robin Wright, Sacred Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 252.
6. Bernard K. Duffy and Ronald H. Carpenter, Douglas MacArthur: Warrior as Wordsmith, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 151.
7. Speech to the Sperry Rand Corporation, New York City, July 30, 1957. Major Vorin E. Whan, Jr., ed., A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 333.
8. Duffy and Carpenter, op. cit., p. 151.
9. Washington's Farewell Address, Philadelphia, September 17, 1796. Speeches of the American Presidents, ed., Janet Padell and Steven Anzovin (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1988), p. 20.
10. Patrick J. Buchanan, Chapter 4, "The Myth of American Isolationism," in A Republic, Not An Empire, op. cit., pp. 47-55.
11. Ibid., pp. 52-53. Emphasis added.
12. Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong (New York: Thomas Dunne Books), pp. 238-239.
13. "Bin Laden 9/11 planning video aired," CBC News, September 7, 2006. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/09/07/al-qaeda-tape.html.
14. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong, op. cit., pp. 239-240.
15. Maybury, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, op.cit.
16. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, op. cit., p. 390.
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ARRA News Service. He is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic and author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values.
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| Editorial Cartoon by Gary Varvel |
by Nelson Hultberg, Contributing Author: “What is America’s destiny,” asks Patrick Buchanan? “The answer depends upon another question: How do we see America? As the ‘world’s last superpower’, whose wealth and might must be used to reshape the world in our own image? Or as the land of liberty to be loved and preserved for itself? Is it our duty and destiny to go out into the world to seek monsters to destroy, or do we instead keep before us the Founding Fathers’ goal of defending the peace and freedom of our own country and becoming a light unto the nations? Do we follow the vision of Washington or the temptation of Wilson?”1When the Founding Fathers formed their Republic in 1787, their view of foreign policy was not to solve the world’s problems; it was to defend our country’s security and survival.
As Professor Thomas G. West tells us, “For the Founders….foreign policy was conceived primarily as defensive….Alliances were to be entered into with the understanding that a self-governing nation must keep itself aloof from the quarrels of other nations, except as needed for national defense. Government had no right to spend the taxes or lives of its own citizens to spread democracy to other nations or to engage in enterprises aiming at imperialistic hegemony.”2
In light of this, we must examine today’s foreign policy that the Democrats and Republicans in Washington have formed. Is it a policy that has our security and survival at heart? Or is it a policy that is driven by the irrational goals of neoconservative factions? Is it America First? Or is it world hegemony dominated? It should be pretty obvious that it is the latter.
The question we must ask is: Are the seeking of world hegemony and the spreading of democracy proper goals for America? The Founders would say: No! Such a foreign policy is misguided and will bring America nothing but oppressive debt, economic decay, and moral vitiation. But in order to understand this we must first understand the major danger that confronts America today – Islamist terrorism and why it has come about.
There are two basic factors that have created Islamist terrorism, and neither of them are well understood by our authorities today. They are 1) the irrational religious worldview of Islam, and 2) Western intervention into Mideast cultures over the centuries. These are not the only motives, but they are the primary motives. Let’s investigate them.
The Metaphysics of Islam
1) When I speak of the “irrational religious worldview of Islam,” I mean the metaphysical views of Islamic theologians and scholars adopted over the centuries beginning a thousand years ago. This came about because of their departure from the Hellenistic emphasis on reason as one of our prime tools to decipher reality, truth, and goodness. Starting around the eleventh century, Islam’s leading intellectuals abandoned man’s capacity for reason as a tool to explain the mysteries and requisites of life. The inexplicable “will of Allah” became the fount of all that happens. Free will was denied. Consequently modernity, built by reason and science, is impossible for Muslims to achieve because Islam rejects what is termed, in the West, man’s God given reason. Life becomes, in the Islamic mind, a predestined stage play that Allah has willed absolutely. The favorite saying, “Inshallah” (If God wills it), is the standard theme of discourse in Mideast countries. Natural law perceived by reason is dismissed. Cause and effect are illusions. All human actions and all of life’s events are a product of Allah’s will.
This rejection of reason in metaphysical matters has doomed Islamic culture to perpetual backwardness with no hope to achieve civilizational progress. Robert R. Reilly explains this tragedy in his provocative book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. From this cultural backwardness has sprung a pervasive bitterness and humiliation among many Muslims, which in turn has spawned “Islamism,” which is the radical sector of the Islamic religion. It dreams of reviving jihad and world conquest in somewhat the same manner that Hitler preached the glory of Germanic conquest over Europe as a salve for the humiliating defeat of Germany in World War I. But it is very important to note that Islamism is just the fundamentalist part of Islam. As Reilly points out, most Muslims “find terrorism morally repugnant and alien to Islam’s core teachings.”3
But Islamist terrorism still has a dreadful appeal to growing cults of bitter minds conditioned from birth to believe that “reason” is impotent and “will” (with its concomitant of force) all-important. Hatred of the West then is primarily Islamist hatred. All Muslims disapprove of the Western way of life because of its emphatic materialism, but the virulence of Islamism does not contaminate the majority of them. These, then, are the philosophical roots of Muslim hatred of the West.
Thus it can be safely said that Islam is a religion that has some severe structural flaws, and these flaws create a definite danger to America and other Western nations. How to confront this danger is one of the crucial questions of proper foreign policy. Before tackling it, however, we must first look into the second factor creating Islamist terrorism: European and American intervention into Mideast countries over many centuries.
Sticking Pins In Rattlesnakes
2) One of the most fundamental lessons of foreign policy that all traditional statesmen and military planners have understood for thousands of years is “blowback.” As Richard Maybury points out in his book, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, America has been “sticking pins in rattlesnakes” for decades in the Mideast, and European nations have been engaged in such behavior for centuries. If a country persists in this kind of irrationality, it will eventually get bit in a venomous manner. Manipulatory interventions eventually have nasty consequences.
Unfortunately, such interventions have created in the Muslim mind an intense hatred of those Western nations that intrude into their cultures. These interventions become a very irritating political salt rubbed into the Islamic nations’ subconscious “self-hatred” and “humiliation,” which has been brought about by their own philosophical and cultural impotence.
Unless a better understanding of this hatred of America and Europe by Mideast rattlesnakes is achieved in Washington political circles, atrocities committed against our country from Islamic terrorist groups will continue to escalate for decades into the future.
Islamic hatred of America is only about 65 years old as Maybury’s brilliant little book shows us. But Islamic hatred for European nations goes back 900 years to the Crusades (1095 A.D. – 1300 A.D.) when Europeans systematically pillaged and destroyed Muslim communities. In return the Muslims were certainly no angels.Thus ever since the 12th century, Europeans and Muslims have been clashing over religion, politics, and colonial conquest – especially so during the past 300 years in which the European nations, with their superior technology, have usually dominated the more primitive Muslim countries. They have occupied their lands and manipulated their people with puppet governments placed in power to favor European interests. This has understandably led to much resentment among Muslims.4
“Not since the Middle Ages,” writes Maybury, “have Moslem armies threatened an invasion of Europe, but since that time there has hardly been any five-year period in which European troops have not been under arms on Moslem soil.”5
In the aftermath of World War I, European nations began to phase out of the Mideast because colonialism became too much of a burden to maintain. But into the vacuum leaped the new world power, America, to pursue the discoveries of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s. This was not the blatant colonialism of the past that Europe had partaken in, but rather “voluntary economic involvement” that started justifiably. In the aftermath of World War II, however, it erupted into “coercive political intervention” when the Truman administration, in conjunction with the U.N., rammed through the 1948 partition of Palestine.
America was now involved in the Mideast in a very hubristic manner that was no longer merely economic (and thus justifiable). America’s presence was now political and coercive, and Muslims have not forgotten it. To compound the problem, America then began much heavier manipulative political interventions for various fascist satrapies in the region with billions in aid, weapons, and technical support that continue to this day. In the eyes of the Islamic people, our interventions, our military / bureaucratic presence, and our shoring up of the regimes that tyrannize their lives make us the Great Satan.
The sources of Islamist terrorism are, of course, many faceted. But there are always one or two primary factors in any cause and effect relationship; and the two primary factors that have caused Islamist terrorism are 1) Islam’s metaphysical irrationality and 2) the West’s constant meddling in Mideast affairs.
To the extent that fundamentalist Islamic theologians have gained sway with their cultures’ intelligentsia over the centuries, they have kept the Mideast in backward status. But our role in America cannot be to save misguided cultures from their primitiveness with the butt ends of our rifles. Our role should be one of benign neglect; simply leave them alone. If they want to wallow in cultural idiocy and economic stagnancy, so be it. Our role should be to lead the world to rationality and prosperity through the shining light of example. Let us restore the vision of the Founders and demonstrate to the world, as we did from 1787 to 1913, what a truly free country is like.
Contesting Neoconservative Arrogance
Because of our establishment intellectuals’ failure to grasp the two root causes of fundamentalist Islam’s hatreds, our nation has been plunged into twelve years of suicidal overextension in the foreign policy arena.
The Iraqi war was launched by the “neoconservative” George Bush administration because it was supposed to be necessary in order to defend our country against the terrorist threat that arose from the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. In the minds of many American patriots and military personnel, however, the war in Iraq was not necessary to fight terrorism. Moreover its cost, in both spirit and material, weighed on our decaying society in irreparable ways.
As General Douglas MacArthur warned President Kennedy to stay out of a guerrilla war in Indochina,6 so too should America stay out of such wars in the Mideast. Winning a guerrilla war on the guerrillas’ home territory requires devastating the indigenous population and then occupying the country for decades with authoritarian methods. This is not the American way; it is the way of imperialists.
MacArthur was one of our greatest, most daring generals. He was a consummate patriot who well understood the necessity to go to war when it was forced upon us. But he also understood the dangers of the 20th century Leviathan and its manipulation of its citizens to justify war.
In 1957, perhaps anticipating Vietnam, MacArthur warned that, “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.”7
General MacArthur was speaking 57 years ago, but does not his warning fit today’s statists who revel in stampeding the people with constant threats about terrible evils abroad? The names and events change downthrough the centuries, but the ploys of Lord Acton’s power lusters remain the same. They continue to spur well-meaning men to war fever with “the cry of grave national emergency.”
Today’s guerrilla wars in the Mideast are no different in principle than the one MacArthur cautioned us about in Indochina. They must bog our nation and fighting troops down for decades into the future, which America is not prepared to do.
Iraqi Consequences of Neoconservatism
Because of this, what has been the actual result of our war in Iraq? After a decade of fighting, political wrangling, thousands of deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars expended, we conned ourselves into believing that Islamic theocrats were eager for American style government. Thus all we had to do was dispense Jeffersonian lectures to them, accompanied by several years of political counseling, and Iraq would become a “wise and modern democracy” in the Mideast.
After ten years of this self-delusion, we ended up declaring victory and pulling out of Iraq, claiming our goal of bending the population to Western values had been accomplished. But it didn’t take long before infighting commenced among the tribes that populate the region. Like all shrewd guerrillas, the Shiite, Sunni, and Wahabbi extremists played a waiting game until the ravages of war and the difficulties of foreign occupation eroded Washington’s desire to remain in the country. With the rise of ISIS, the natural “tribalism” of the Mideast is returning to create chaos and undo what democratic forms have been constructed.
This was foreseen by numerous perceptive students of history and Mideast culture. Muslim tribes have been fighting among themselves for 1400 years, and American political philosophy is not going to eliminate the hostilities they hold for each other, nor will it change their theocratic antagonism toward democracy and individual rights. The political forms that we manage to erect will eventually be junked by the tribal mentalities that dominate Islam. The only way to avert this is to become a permanent occupational force and engage in “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” as George Orwell put it.
Our statists in Washington are bewildered by the difficulty in getting Muslims to be enthusiastic about democracy and an American style Constitution. But as Richard Maybury points out, Muslims have their own Constitution. It’s the Koran, and it has ruled them for over a millennium. Yet our solons imagine that they can overturn 1400 years of metaphysical tradition with guns and gung-ho American lectures.
This is embarrassingly naïve. Change in a culture’s metaphysical views takes place over centuries, not years. It moves like a glacier sliding across a continent. And it does not respond to the butt end of a rifle. Our hubris has already cost us over a trillion dollars and thousands of lives on the battlefield in this Mideast cauldron, as well as untold lives lost morale-wise on the home front as our economy slouches toward bankruptcy (and our culture toward Gomorrah) because of our government’s reckless reaching beyond its financial and spiritual supply lines. Great nations fall precisely because of this kind of blindness, this kind of senseless waste and inhumanity that the Bushes and Obamas of history so callously heap upon their fellowman.
Hard Questions for Americans
Just as important as the practical and strategic irrationalities of Washington’s invasion of Iraq was the overall moral inadequacy of our position. The following questions need to be considered by all of us regarding the Iraqi war and any possible return of our troops:
What if Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia were one country called Persia, and it was a sophisticated world power? How would we like it if this Persian superpower was constantly intervening into our affairs to guarantee a steady supply of our wheat and corn by shoring up political dictatorships in several of our states with loans and weapons?
Is this not what America has done in the Mideast during the past 65 years by shoring up the Shah of Iran and his ruthless secret police, by shoring up the House of Saud which lives in Marie Antoinette style while dispensing crumbs to its people, and by shoring up several smaller satrapies in the region? Is this not what we have done to guarantee a steady supply of Mideast oil?
How would we like it if this Islamic superpower, Persia, had pressured the United Nations into partitioning our east coast states into two sections – one for blacks and one for whites – giving New York, Massachusetts, and the northeast to Jesse Jackson to rule as he sees fit, and in the process, uprooting hundreds of thousands of families and their property? Is this not what America and the U.N. did in 1948 in Palestine with its major ethnic groups?
How would we like it if Persia was building military bases in and around America over several decades to maintain vigilance over our affairs and help protect Jesse Jackson and his newly partitioned country? Is this not what America has done for several decades in the Mideast in regards to Israel?
How would we like it if Persia did not wish for Washington to build up its defense forces, and thus began an eight year bombing campaign upon our country that killed hundreds of thousands of American women and children? Is this not what America did to Iraq from 1992 to 2000? Sure, Iraq was ruled by a ruthless tyrant, but where in the Constitution does it say our foreign policy is to rid the world of ruthless tyrants?
How would we like it if Persia was using its privilege of possessing the world’s reserve currency to export its domestic inflation into our country? How would we like it if Persia’s Islamic corporations and bureaucrats continually patrolled Washington in their white turbans and robes attempting to sway our politicians into doing their bidding? Is this not what America has been doing in the Mideast over the past several decades?
Listen to Our Ablest Generals
We correctly retaliated to 9/11 with a blitzkrieg of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But history will surely show that we made a tragic mistake by pressing our bet and invading Iraq. General Norman Schwarzkopf rightly warned George Bush Sr. not to go into Iraq in Gulf War I. It is a “tar pit” of insanity and virulence, and has been this way for centuries. “Don’t fight with these troglodytes,” was the advice of the ablest military men. You’ll just get bogged down in a grisly guerrilla war that is not genuinely winnable without authoritarian occupation. Bush Sr. wisely listened to Schwarzkopf as did President Kennedy to MacArthur in the early 1960s. JFK was in the process of pulling out of Vietnam when he was assassinated.8
Authoritarian occupations violate one of the most important principles of traditional foreign policy wisdom learned over the centuries: Better, freer nations do not invade less free nations just because they are primitive and tyrannical to their people. The job of correct foreign policy is to protect our nation’s security and survival while exercising extreme prudence in taking on the onus of war. We need to listen to our ablest generals with hard-fought field experience, rather than career politicians who wish to manipulate the military for their personal aggrandizement.
If we continue to pursue hegemony in the Mideast, we will destroy the last vestiges of freedom and financial solvency we as a nation have left. Washington’s neoconservatism is driving us into the role of a dying empire. Its PNAC doctrine of “benevolent global hegemony” is in reality “militaristic global hegemony.” Formulated by Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz in the 1990s, it is apparently now Washington’s permanent plan for world governance. Both Democrats and Republicans are comfortable with its advocacy. But this is what imperialists advocate; and it is what brings on their death throes. It happened to Rome. It happened to the Ottoman Turks. It happened to Napoleon. It happened to Britain. Is this what America now stands for?
In view of General MacArthur’s warning about stampeding Americans into war, what would he be saying about the Democrats and Republicans today? Would he not be thundering out a vehement condemnation of their pundits and politicians who are so eager to send young boys off to fight for dubious goals? In MacArthur’s mind, wars must always be fought judiciously after much consideration, never indiscriminately and hastily as our politicians are doing today. War is the most abominable of human endeavors. To entrust its ready execution to those behind mahogany desks in Washington, who have never put boots on the ground, is fraught with danger.
The Root Causes and How to Confront Them
The establishment explanation for Islamic hatred that the George Bush administration put forth is: “They hate us because of our freedom.” As we can now see, this is shallow and unacceptable. The real causes of Muslim hatred are philosophical (Islamic self-hatred spawned by metaphysical irrationality) and political (American interventionism).
Democrats and Republicans are guilty of simplification in attributing Islamist terrorism solely to Islamic fundamentalism’s rise in Mideast culture. It is the combination of Islamic fundamentalism with our interventionism that has brought today’s terrorism about. This is a two-part problem. Without American intervention, Islamic fundamentalism would never have swollen to become the curse that it is.
To come to grips with this will entail opening up our minds and seeing both sides of the Islamic-Western clash. People who cannot see both sides of human conflict are doomed to being blindsided throughout their lives. Such short-range mentalities always bring disaster when they assume the leadership of great countries.
Thus Islamist terrorism is a much deeper and more complex problem than what Democrats and Republicans view it as. It is going to require a much more sophisticated approach than just military retaliation against its perpetrators. It is going to require an ideological metamorphosis in our foreign policy. A new conservative paradigm must capture the minds of our statesmen that respects the inherited wisdom of history and the rights of man.
The place to begin is with the first of our Presidents, George Washington, from his Farewell Address: “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world ….Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”9
Does it need to be said for modern pundits that Washington was one of our ablest generals and a true patriot? If he were alive today he would tell us that reason and prudence dictate to us that foreign nations are best left alone even when their rulers are primitive and pathological, in fact especially then. Islamic nations must be allowed to work out their own destiny even if they choose backward theocracies over enlightened democracy.
This is not an advocacy of isolationism. As Patrick Buchanan points out in A Republic, Not An Empire, isolationism is a smear term used to defeat a sane policy of America First and drag us into a globalist agenda that destroys our sovereignty. America has never been an isolationist nation, and it should never be one.10
“The message of Washington’s Farewell Address was not to isolate America from Europe,” says Buchanan, “but to keep it independent of Europe. Stay out of foreign wars, Washington admonished….Avoid ‘permanent alliances’; devote your energies to our own country. Independence, not isolation, is the American tradition.” 11
A policy of national independence is what we as American patriots desperately need to restore, where we look after our own, where we fight in retaliation when our security and survival are at stake. But we do not go abroad in search of despots to bring down. We do not intervene in other nation’s affairs to alter their cultures, rearrange their borders, and browbeat them into democratic institutions. The “benevolent global hegemony” of neoconservative doctrine should be just as repugnant to Americans as all other policies of conquest down through history from Pax Romana, to Pax Britannica, to Nazi Germany’s seeking of “lebensraum.”
A Proper Retaliation
Our solution to the 9/11 WTC attack should have been very powerful and very simple. We started out correctly by attacking the Taliban; but then Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney, made the decision to expand the war to Iraq.
“In the Afghan phase of this war,” Buchanan tells us, “we had the support of the world and the acquiescence of Arab and Islamic governments. But when we invaded Iraq, we played into bin Laden’s hand. The Arab and Islamic world turned hostile, for they could not see the link between the Saudis who attacked us and the Iraqis we were attacking. And just as the appearance of Suleiman at the gates of Vienna united the quarrelsome Christian kings against the Turk, so the appearance of Bush in Baghdad united Islam against America.”12
What is crucial to grasp is that we did not need to invade Iraq to fight terrorism and respond to the WTC attack, and thus properly defend America. Nor do we need to maintain a powerful military and bureaucratic presence throughout the Mideast. There are three important strategic actions that we should have implemented.
First, we should have swiftly invaded Afghanistan. This was justified because the Taliban gave sanctuary to Osama bin Laden with full knowledge of his past crimes and attack upon the WTC, yet refused to relinquish him.13 They were accessories and just as guilty under the legal principles that sustain civilization. The fact that collateral damage occurs is unavoidable. Our attacks, being retaliatory, were justified. Bin Laden and the Taliban were the initiators and thus the cause of any collateral deaths, as all initiators in war are.
Second, when bin Laden escaped into Pakistan, our remaining efforts should have been clandestine, commando-oriented espionage in the manner of the Israelis’ pursuit of Adolf Eichmann. Our goal should have been to track down bin Laden by use of every espionage resource we had in our arsenal, rather than large-scale troop occupation and political reorientation of Afghanistan’s mountainous, tribal culture. Eliminating the Taliban without permanent occupation of the country is the height of neoconservative naivety. And establishing a democracy for Afghans will be no different than it has been in Iraq – an ultimate failure. If this approach had been followed, bin Laden would have been captured much sooner than he was.
Once bin Laden was killed, we should have announced to the Islamic nations that we would pull our military and support personnel out of all Mideast countries that did not want us and reappraise our position in those that did on a case by case basis. In addition we would phase out grants of aid and weapons to all Mideast nations including Israel (but would come to the aid of Israel if Arab nations attack her). We would leave Arab nations alone, and we fully expected them to leave us alone. If there were any future attacks upon our shores from terrorists connected to their nations, then in the words of Arnold Schwarzenneger, “We’ll be back, baby!”
Our need to protect our “oil interests” would be done through diplomacy and trade. Oil is the “property of its owners” and needs to be treated economically by the marketplace rather than militarily by troops and bureaucrats.
Third, we should have made a very important additional announcement by sending envoys from our State Department to every one of the Mideast nations to meet with their rulers. In these private meetings, we should have made it very clear that if, in the future, we had to retaliate against their country for fomenting and harboring terrorists involved in bombings of America, then we would not just attack their country and its infrastructure as we had done to the Taliban, we would rain a shower of smart bombs down upon the private residence and family of the ruler himself. We would do what Ronald Reagan did to the Libyan ruler Qadaffi and his family palace. And we wouldn’t do it sporadically. We would do it relentlessly until the ruler himself was dead.
After Reagan slapped Qadaffi with a bit of Yankee retaliation for his barbarism and effrontery in the late 1980s, good old Muammar developed a different attitude, did he not? Would not other Mideast rulers react in like manner? Would they not begin to police their own terrorists domestically to make sure they do not plan any more American attacks? Would they not readily relinquish any and all terrorists involved in attacks on America to American authorities promptly? As a consequence we would not have to be anchored in their lands losing thousands of brave soldiers in the process.
“Terrorism is the price of empire,” says Buchanan. “If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire. Strategic disengagement is not a strategy of defeat but a recognition of reality. The Islamic world, roiled by its own tribal, religious, and national struggles, must work out its own destiny….
“Time is on our side in this struggle, for Islamic radicals cannot build great nations nor solve the problems of modernity. The only problem of Islamic peoples these extremists can help them solve is the problem of America’s massive presence. Remove that root cause of this war, and Arab and Islamic peoples will see no longer through a glass darkly, but face to face, who their true enemies are.”14
Thus we did not need to invade Iraq to handle the terrorist problem. Our efforts should have been solely in Afghanistan and geared toward ferreting out bin Laden rather than “nation building.” Our present approach is tragically self-defeating; but this is the level of historical acumen and strategic creativity possessed by today’s establishment pundits and politicians. The world of politics always has its unimaginative bullies who revel in the use of brute force because they possess no moral compass to guide them and because they can’t generate the necessary cerebration to fashion wiser, less destructive strategies of defense. Unfortunately modern day Washington is now a hotbed for such people.
The problem of Islamist terrorism is basically a problem of prohibiting its infiltration of our country because that is the only way terrorists can hurt us. They have no military power that can reach our shores as a threat. But this view will take strong immigration reform to end the present “open border” policies of the Democrats and Republicans. This means shutting most Muslims out as immigrants and returning to the pre-1965 Immigration Accords – then setting an example to the world by building a free country here at home. Eventually modernist Muslims would emulate our economic system over the decades. The fundamentalist Muslims would be left to stagnate in their own ignorance.
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
If we as a country do not bring ourselves to confront the Democrat-Republican insanity of seeking hegemony in the Mideast, our fate will be no different than that of Britain and the Soviet Union before us. As the British found out in Afghanistan and the Sudan in the 19th century and then later in Palestine between 1918-1948, and as the Russians found out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Mideast is a swamp of ungovernable tribal factions, long standing ethnic hatreds, and barbaric religious squabbles. It has been this way for thousands of years.15 If we persist in attempting to establish hegemony over this region, we will have to become an occupying military force. This can do nothing but hasten the bankruptcy of our nation.
It is true that no great country should ever be concerned with whether it is loved by the rest of the world. But a great country must always be willing to objectively examine its policies, both past and present, to be sure it is not creating its enemies itself through ignorance and arrogance.
There is no more lethal combination of flaws for a man to possess than ignorance and arrogance. Those intellects who have studied history and grasp the flawed nature of man realize this. We see the hubristic tendencies of man throughout the centuries and long for leaders desirous of leaving people alone to seek their own destiny. We fear greatly the dreadful consequences of allowing ignorant and arrogant men to occupy the White House. We know that the tyrannical, bully mentalities of existence will always be with us in some capacity or another. But we also know that Washington and Jefferson wisely warned us to never let our destiny be controlled by such crude amoralists in positions of political power.
To be a country in pursuit of empire is pragmatically unworkable, for it bankrupts all those who attempt it. But more importantly it is morally reprehensible, for it violates the “rights of man” – the very creed that spawned our nation.
We are not a country of empire; we are a country of peace and individual freedom. “So let us set about creating a new impenetrable shield for the Republic,” as Buchanan advises, “crafting a new foreign policy rooted in the national interest, so America may pass through the turbulent decades before us, serene and secure, and men will look back, one hundred years hence, and say, that, yes, the twenty-first century, too, was an American Century.”16
This will require brave, moral men and women who are willing to stand up to the liberals and neoconservatives to reject their globalist agenda. We are a unique nation with a destiny to fulfill. It is to show the world what freedom is and how it is to be preserved, which cannot be done if we merge our sovereignty into World Government. And it cannot be done if we are browbeating backward people into submission to democracy with the butt ends of our rifles. We are a sovereign Republic, and we must never let that ideal die.
Notes
1. Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, Reclaiming America's Destiny (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), pp. 389-390.
2. Thomas G. West, "The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics," Heritage Foundation, July 18, 2007, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/fp12.cfm.
3. Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011, p. 192.
4. Richard J. Maybury, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast (Placerville, CA: Bluestocking Press, 1999), pp. 66-84.
5. Ibid., p. 70. From Godfrey Jansen, quoted in Robin Wright, Sacred Rage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 252.
6. Bernard K. Duffy and Ronald H. Carpenter, Douglas MacArthur: Warrior as Wordsmith, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 151.
7. Speech to the Sperry Rand Corporation, New York City, July 30, 1957. Major Vorin E. Whan, Jr., ed., A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), p. 333.
8. Duffy and Carpenter, op. cit., p. 151.
9. Washington's Farewell Address, Philadelphia, September 17, 1796. Speeches of the American Presidents, ed., Janet Padell and Steven Anzovin (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1988), p. 20.
10. Patrick J. Buchanan, Chapter 4, "The Myth of American Isolationism," in A Republic, Not An Empire, op. cit., pp. 47-55.
11. Ibid., pp. 52-53. Emphasis added.
12. Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong (New York: Thomas Dunne Books), pp. 238-239.
13. "Bin Laden 9/11 planning video aired," CBC News, September 7, 2006. http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/09/07/al-qaeda-tape.html.
14. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong, op. cit., pp. 239-240.
15. Maybury, The Thousand Year War in the Mideast, op.cit.
16. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, op. cit., p. 390.
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ARRA News Service. He is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic and author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values.
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