The View From 1776

--------------------
Democratic Party liberals already are loading their weapons for the 2006 Congressional elections, and they believe that the Bush administration’s key vulnerability is foreign policy.  They salivate at the prospect of repeating their youthful Vietnam war political triumphs.  “Quagmire” is once again being drummed up as a winning slogan by moral stalwarts like Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry. 

Liberals’ own foreign policy, to paraphrase Clausewitz, is really nothing but domestic political campaigning by other means. 

Just as when Senator Kerry fulsomely lied in public hearings before Congress about American servicemen’s conduct in Vietnam, they now excitedly parade a small group of dissident servicemen who repeat the PR ploy by testifying that, top to bottom, Americans were ordered to torture terrorist prisoners.  Just as when Senator Kerry lied to advance his personal ambitions, heedless of the effect on Americans still in action in Vietnam, liberals are again indifferent to whether their actions endanger American servicemen, so long as those actions mislead the public and help them to win elections.

When liberals’ “ideas” are boiled down, all we find at the bottom of the pot is a poisonous hallucinogen: pull all our troops out of Iraq, on the blind faith that Al Queda will leave us alone if we publicly embrace them as fellow freedom-fighters.  Pander to the portion of the public who want to pursue selfish pleasures unhampered by patriotism or calls to duty and to those who lack the stamina to stick with necessary hard work. 

Liberals’ foreign policy ostensibly appeals to universal human principles, yet it is in actuality aimed at promoting their domestic political ambitions.  The vital national interests of the United States play second fiddle to their hatred and their passion to destroy the Bush administration at any cost. 

Basically, liberals’ foreign policy is a reversion to the winning ways of President Bill Clinton.  To that end, employ his wag-the-dog tactic in foreign policy.  Dazzle the public with PR distractions. 

Enthrall the liberal media, campus professors, and callow students with the President’s empathetic drumming in an African hotel room, carefully lighted for “candid” TV programming, followed by his tearfully declaring America’s guilt for all the world’s suffering.  But ignore the millions of Africans butchered by American liberals’ fellow-socialists, the murderous African dictators. 

Pretend that there would be no wars if the United States abandoned what President Clinton’s Boomer generation called American colonial imperialism, i.e., don’t fight to protect our national interests.  Hand our foreign affairs over to the UN.

Avoid any real military engagement that could get Americans killed.  Lob a few token cruise missiles in the general direction of Osama Bin Ladin.  When forced to deal with genocide in the Balkans, confine our engagement to high-altitude bombing.  When North Korea threatens the world’s survival with development of nuclear weaponry, sweep it under the rug with a bit of bribery and trust that they will keep their word.

Pretend that there is no threat from Al Queda, that the war on terror is a conservative lie.  Have the ACLU denounce efforts under the Patriot Act to prevent repetitions of 9/11.  Declare every Defense Department action to be a pay-off to fat-cat corporations.

Above all, speak in grandiose terms of humanity in the abstract, on the world’s biggest stage for socialist propaganda, the UN.  Avoid the nitty-gritty of matters essential to our national survival, like protecting our access to Middle Eastern oil against Al Queda efforts to link with Saddam Hussein in Iraq and to foment an Al Queda political coup in neighboring Saudi Arabia.  Wink broadly at history’s greatest financial crime, the UN’s Oil-for-Humanitarian-Aid program that enriched the French companies and French political officials to whom Senator Kerry “sensitively” wants to hand over American foreign policy.

These liberal foreign policy “ideas” emanate from the sloganeering of left-wing academics on our college campuses, which purportedly gives them the imprimatur of scientific truth.  But, as the academics’ socialistic theories of international peace cannot withstand rational scrutiny, liberals must resort to the mindless emotion of public opinion.  Hence the mass, staged media events of the sort we see exhibited in European street mobs and “peace” rallies in Washington, DC, featuring placards with vulgar and obscene denunciations of the Bush administration. 

Liberals’ theories of international peace must further assume that public opinion, so easily manipulated by the liberal media in the United States and Europe, is equally malleable elsewhere in the world by our liberal media, that projecting an image of welfare-state “caring” will defuse the aggressions of the Muslim world.

This fairy-land view of the world is promoted by the self-centered, sensual preoccupation of media reporters like New York Times’s columnists Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman, who, along with the Times’s editorial board, see a world in which the only important things are an “up yours” effrontery to religious Jews and Christians, foul language, artistic and literary crudity, abortion, drugs, marital infidelity, and sexual promiscuity.  These, in the liberal view, are the freedoms that define America.  Contrary views are unscientific ignorance.

Liberals believe that their foreign policy is the product of rational thinking and that, therefore, everybody in the world will immediately recognize the correctness of liberal theories.  This is just a repetition of Auguste Comte’s naive expectations in the 19th century that the whole world would eagerly come to sit at his feet and to learn from him when his Religion of Humanity had been broadcast by French propagandists.

But, as history makes decisively clear, achieving liberals’ grand vision of a perfect world would necessitate eliminating all local customs and all individuality in the name of what they call social justice.  It would ultimately necessitate the establishment of a world-wide Soviet Union.

Liberal foreign policy is based, not on human nature as it exists, but on a mythological theory that every human institution is based upon purely rational “ideas,” upon the sort of wonkism that liberals substitute for real understanding of the world. 

As we have seen repeatedly since the French Revolution of 1789, however, real people in the real world are not motivated exclusively by the abstract theories that crowd the fevered brains of liberal intellectuals.  Cohesive political entities are the products of accretions over many centuries of legal, economic, and political institutions, customs, and moral standards that are deeply understood by their citizens, but can’t be neatly dissected and rearranged to fit the abstract “ideas” of liberal state-planners.

Liberals’ theories of manufacturing international peace via the evanescent medium of “international law” and “the community of nations” presume that all nations and all peoples share common national interests and common national and cultural goals.  Put our fate into the hands of a few “rational” liberals gathered around a UN conference table, and we will all live happily ever after. 

Seven thousand years of history proves this to be arrant nonsense.  Every liberal-socialist “progressive” endeavor to talk aggressive nations out of war, from the League of Nations to the UN, has come to nothing but feckless blathering about the “one world” doctrine of “socialism in our time.”

Visit MoveOff Network Members