After an exhausting session with Victoria's Secret Police, Ed Rasimus
confessed the following:
For your further edification as you seem to enjoy throwing the neocon
label around, here is some info on what neo-conservatives are really
all about. (one might note that Kristol started the movement in the
'70s.)
First off...how 'bout dropping this notion that I'm "throwing the
neocon label around," you've finally taken the time to see that it's
NOT simply a liberal pejorative.
Quote:
Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a
geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and
environmental regulation.
|
Not surprising that the guys in power will always get to define what
"national interest" is at any given moment. Pursuing a foreign policy,
i.e. pre-emptive wars on the other side of the globe while couching it
in terms of self-defense, does NOT pass the common sense test to me
(nor would it pass this test to most inhabitants of this planet).
Quote:
A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large
nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of
yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological
interests in addition to more material concerns.
|
I take this to be more in the vein of Hobbes' "Leviathan," rather than
Locke's "Second Treatise of Civil Government." Simply being the
Superpower du jour is not license to discard the moral principals your
nation built its reputation on. I suspect gwb & co are now trying to
get the UN involved because he recognizes that he could lose the
election in Nov, IOW just to save his political ass.
Quote:
Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always
feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack
from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in
our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in
World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today,
when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical
calculations of national interest are necessary.
|
And yet these same forward thinking standard bearers for truth,
justice and the american way, are livid that democratic nations would
oppose the "american view," of how the world should be. I call that
arrogance, but will amend that to hubris for the sake of polite
conversation.
Quote:
The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have
difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs,
just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and
cultural conservatism.
|
Clearly talking about Buchanan...notice the quote said "traditional
element?" It would appear that you have incorrectly identified
yourself as "traditional [conservative]" according to Kristol.
Quote:
But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current
president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this
new political environment, although it is clear they did not
anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did.
|
In my previous posts there are citations containing links (IOW URLs
within the citations) to writings by neocons during Clinton's
administration where they called for taking SH down "on principal."
For Kristol to suggest that gwb & co did not "anticipate this role" at
all or specifically WRT to Iraq is false. That is simply political
nonsense.
But thanks for the cite.
Robey