A Geopolitical Imperative: The Re-Invigilation of Neoconservativism. July 17, 2007
Posted by azandi in Essays.trackback
Francis Fukuyama, in his 2006 essay “After Neoconservativism” proclaiming his departure from the greater neoconservative movement, accurately observed that America is now, once again at the crossroads of history; that the decisions it elects to make in the coming years will consecrate its place in time as either the grandiose champion of Enlightenment values, liberating the world from medievalist strife and tyranny, or fail as a crumbling monument to what was once the supreme illuminant of liberty, consequenting in absolute civilizational dissolution.
This last great observation marks the symbolic End of Fukuyama, and marks the beginning of a new age in which the renaissancial philosophy he helped forge must be employed to fortify the untaintable human rights of all people throughout this increasingly barbaric and totallitarian world. For indeed, Dr. Fukuyama is quite correct in asserting that America stands at the nexus of a paradigm shift, and the choices it makes now will either forever elevate it to a golden age of western primacy and peace, or the rise of theocratic fascism and utter societal obliteration.
He is quite mistaken in arguing that the relenquishment of the chalice of interventionalist-minded foreign policy is the solution. Neoconservativism has always been the only true enervating defender and catalyst of classical liberalism throughout the ages, and without imputation the only solution to the tremendous challenges the Western world faces today, a thesis I will catagorically substantiate in the following postulations.
It wouldn’t be an unfair assessment to suggest that the word “neoconservative”, or better yet “neocon” has been rendered a sort of socio-political taboo in recent years, sort of like a new, politically-centric “n word”. Its funny, if you go to Cafepress you can find a lot of political t-shirts of various affiliations boasting silly little slogans and buzz-words and whatnot. Conservatives shirts, liberal shirts, libertarian shirts, and anarchy shirts, oh my!
But if you click on “neoconservative shirts”, instead of getting a catalog of wares with slogans such as “liberty forever, liberty for all” or “liberalism grown up”, all you can find is “STOP THE EVIL NEOCON FASCIST NAZI CONSPIRACY!!!” and “FUCK NEOCONS!”. This is the only catagory wherein the goods are antagonizing the respective party.
You may shrug this off as some innane triviality, but it rather adequately demonstrates what has happened to what was once a highly-respected class of Straussian intellectuals and philosophers; who have now been reduced to a shady esoteric bogeyman mocked by Colbertian half-wit teenagers who wouldn’t know who Irving Kristol was if he jacked them in the face, let alone read a sentence of neo-Platonic objectivist theory.
The term “neoconservative” was originally coined by the infamous American socialist Michael Harrington to demarcate his former Trotskyist colleagues who had abandoned Marx and instead, inspired by the philosophical tracts of Leo Strauss, elected to pursue the spread of market-based, anti-communist libertine social infrastructures as an avenue of foreign policy. Thus, with the highly intellectual and esoteric formulations of Irving Kristol, his son William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle and others, the movement was borne; from the ashes of the failed experimental enterprise of socialism to a brave new philosophy for a dangerous new century.
In the cosmopolitan plebian stage, even the most remote utterance of neoconservative sentiment is contrived as sacrilege, as an allegiance with some elusive cult of oil barons and war-mongering Zionist Bonesmen out to enslave the entire planet under some fascist hegemony. Of course, to anyone who knows anything about neoconservatism (a faculty grossly in absentia within its critics) this notion is patently absurd. And to dispel it, something other than the prosaic, hopelessly banal platitudes offered up by people like Seaon Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, people who are unfortunately woefully unaware of the intricacies of neoconservatism and how to substantiate its merits.
Neoconservatism poses the notion that the Hegellian/neo-Marxian position of an inevitable “end of history” denoted by a free, civil libertarian society is the ultimate final culmination in anthropological progression, and that a dominant superpower can and should push the world towards that inevitability through foreign policy. It is in the best interests of the superpower to set the barometers of geopolitical evolution, particularly when forces of barbarism are threatening the existence of Western civilization.
Now, let us examine the opponent we are currently facing in this perrenial joust for geopolitical primacy, the theocratic fanatacist and fascist envoys of imperialistic Wahhabism and Salafism; in laymen’s terms “militant Islam”. The most vehement straini of liberalism, those whom follow the doctrines of quasi-intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, often suggest that terrorism is the offspring of the west’s malevolance and imperalistic appetite. This notion is so vilely masochistic and preposterous any child who looks at the facts for more than 5 seconds could easily cut through its transparency.On top of calling for the absolutist eradication of all Western civilization and the imposition of the Islamic totallitarian caliphate throughout the hemispheres, al-Qaida and their numerous subsidiaries and paralells have called for the extinction of the “pagan” state of India and the rise of an all-Islamic Kashmir, the return of East Timor to Indonesia, the relenquishment of significant amouns of land to form a new islamist state by the Phillipenes, and of course, the obliteration of the state of Israel. Tell me, Noam, is all this because we weren’t nice to them?
Speaking of Israel, I would like to take this opportunity to make a declaration about this oh so sacred province of the messiah. One of the main, if not the chief arguments employed against the liberation effort in Iraq, as well as the doctrine of neoconservative/interventionalist foreign policy in general has been the summoning of the menacing bogeyman of Israel. “War for Israel”, “Zionist neocons”, this tired, meandering ilk expropriating the motives of this struggle as some sort of maniacal front for the “gargantuan” Israeli lobby have been echoed by the likes of George Galloway and Susan Sontag for years.
These charges are basically predicated upon the fact that indeed, the highly sophisticated Straussian philosophers which constituted the mind-muscle of the Bush administration were indeed Jewish; Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, etc. And thats basically it. This mildly anti-Semetic observation is the backbone of the “evil Zionist conspiracy theorist” faction.
But for any serious thinker the refutation of such an exorbitant insinnuation is almost facile. If this campaign against theocratic fundamentalism really was just a Zion imperialist campaign in disguise, why on earth would the first target by Iraq? The Israeli hawks have never cared about it, its been Iran they’re concerned about and if anything an engagement with Iraq would have diminished the chances of a full-scale assault on Iran, and they would have well known that. Wheres your omnipotent Zionist influence now?
And, more importantly, if Wolfowitz and his colleagues really were just puppets for Tel Aviv, why would they have supported the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo to end the genocide of a Muslim minority from a Christian fanatacist like Milosovic? Israel was vehemently opposed the amelioration of these territories, and Wolfowitz helped orchestrate it, wheres your Zionist influence now?
We must also address the popular notion amongst liberals that the plight of the beleagured Palestinian population is the source of the Islamists’ angst, and that if we just mend this ailment they’ll all just go away. This is a very childish last resort on the part of the left to avoid the inevitable confrontation with militant Islam, jihadi expansionalists long predate the 1948 Israeli appropriation; indeed their crusade against Enlightenment era civics is older than even the Balfour Declaration. Bin Ladin has even stated that he doesn’t want a seperate Palestinian state, he just wants the land Israel occupies to be a part of a larger caliphate. 20 percent of Palestinians are former Christians, even more of them are secularists, what kind of fools do liberals take us for if they think this is the reason murders in the name of Allah are happening every day? Were all those offenses I enumerated earlier in this writing about Palestine? East Timor and India Palestinian subsidiaries now?
With all this inscrutable evidence backing the neoconservative position, it would be expected that there would be little no room for debate. But the Republicans have done a simply ghastly job of re-affirming the essential paramounts underlying the reasoning behind the Iraq invasion alone. On top of having a genocidal megalomanical barbarian in control of one of the most geopolitically integral nexus-points in the battleground for civilization, (if that wasn’t enough for the left) you had a state which gave state sponsored safe-haven to Abu Nidal, the most wanted Islamic terrorist of the 20th century, was in close interaction with arch-Islamist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, sheltered Abdul Rahman Yasin, the man who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, and Abu Abbas, the man who murdered Leon Klinghoffer as well as coordinated the Achilee Lauro hijacking. Saddam was also a frontman for the most fanatical Palestinian terror-cells, directly financing the families of suicide bombers to the tune of $25,000 each. It must also be recognized that the terrorist destroyer of the great and glorious golden dome mosque in Samarra, one of the most magnificent and pristine showcases of human architectural ability in the world, was a former member of Saddam’s secret police. So anyone who suggests that Iraq had no ties with terrosim is either choosing to be willfully ignorant or is lying.
On top of all that he was defying a decade’s worth of UN sanctions, simultaneously profitting off the corruption of said organization while his people starved to death through the ghastly Oil for Food Programme. The same UN pedantic monkeys who prevented this end of this whole affair, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladmir Putin, Jacques Chirac, they’re all now in the gutter of conniving tomfoolery. This perfectly demonstrates what the right has known for years, the UN is not a geopolitcally viable diplomatic instrument, if any real action in the world is to be taken it must be done with the assertive initiative of America. If others want to coalition with us, be our guests, but don’t expect us to beg for anyone, multilaterism is a bad joke.
Iraq was never the peaceful sovreign state of Elysiden fields ubiquitously conjured up the teary-eyed mutterings of the left. It had long since compromised its sovreignty under the parameters of international law, having effectively failed in all four of the conditions that constitute a sovreign state. It had invaded two of its neighbors, it had commited genocide against its occupants, it was involved with considerable machinations with weapons of mass destruction contrary to popular belief, and harbored international terrorists. After the 91′ war Saddam was indicted with a decade’s worth of sanctions and had two-thirds of his airspace rendered as no-fly zones, so he was under constant monitoring and surveillance by coalition planes, which he fired upon every day. The notion that we were at peace with Iraq is a conceptual misnomer at best and a bald-faced lie at worst, the period of intermission dividing the 91′ and 03′ wars was merely a lapse of prolonged armed truce that needed to be inevitably broken by someone. We correctly elected to take the initiative this time.
It must also be declaratively and resoundingly pronounced that had we not intervened, Iraq would still have degenerated into the internecine civile strife it is now experiencing. Saddam was running his country into the shambolic abyss, culturally traumatized and economically maimed. The situation pre-liberation was so dilapidated that money was forced to be printed on Xerox machines, utter societal dissolution was inevitable under the status quo of a continued Baathist regime. And when that happened, this time the interventino would be under the banner of a benign and democratic American-led coalition, it would have been Saudi Arabia consolidating power for the Sunni faction, Iran for the Shia and Turkey for the Kurds, which would have been a nearly in-eradicably impeding bulwark against peace in the Middle-East. Again, the war in Iraq was not an optional one.
Moreover the trite and thoughtless allegation employed ad nauseum by the left that “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11″ is innately asinine. Everyone who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks is dead, thus is the nature of a suicide bombing. This war isn’t simply killing bin Ladin and never was, nor should it have been. The Democrats seem to think the buck stops with a diseased old man who has little to no real importance within the overall Islamist ranks beyond the polarizing role of a mystical patriarchal figure. His death would be a just deliverance cosmically, but would mean nothing in the broader scheme of things; he might already even be dead.
And lets not forget the scurrilous “WMD lies” fall-back option conveniently implemented by liberals whenever their arguments begin to collapse. I find this rather amusing because ultimately this is by far the most feeble bulwark the left has constructed to sustain its inherently diseased position. The matter of weapons of mass destruction is arguably the most fertile point of exculpation the Bush administration could hope for:
When every intelligence agency on the planet has universally adjucated that a psychopathic fascist, with known ties to terrorist thugs and the A.Q. Khan bio-weaponry network, (whom on the March of the year of the invasion was corroborating with envoys of Hussein and Kim-Jong Il in Damascus to deliver weaponry to Iraq), with such a damning repetoir what kind of pre-historic moron (even by liberal standards) choose to ignore all that?What kind of shameless coward would be capable of surviving the post-mortem of being wrong about WMD without invading Iraq? Frankly no responsible human being, let alone chief executive, with awareness of the facts could have possibly ignored all the overwhelming evidence in favor of a military incursion.
And let me re-iterate this as dexterously as possible, Saddam did posess weapons of mass destruction. Not only had he used them with the most promiscuous brutality in the past, but even up to the liberation. Coalition forces discovered a meticulous infrascture designed specifically for the production, transporation, and most importantly concealment of nuclear and biological weaponry armaments. Liberals can rest easy now, it can be catagorically proclaimed now that the invasion of Iraq was not predicated upon a single false pretext.
I mean, lets be real here, when pissy little lefties clamor about “lies about weapons of mass destruction”, are they being ironic? Or are they, as they are lying, as they are so keen and shameless in doing so? Or, are they just hopelessly stupid? You can be the arbiter of that.
One of the core foundational groundworks employed by the left as a launch pad from which it can easily throttle its catharthic ravings against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even preemptively dispute any futureengagements are its straw man arguments of “western hypocrisy”. These positions basically gravitate from the notion that we “created Bin Ladin and Saddam”, so who are we to bring them to justice?
We never financed Bin Ladin, ever. We assisted the Afghan mujihideen who’s resistance against Soviet aggression was completely justified, Bin Ladin may have fought on their side but his sponsorship was wholly of Saudi investment. No one could have predicted Pakistani and Bin Ladinist interlocutors eventually bringing on the rise of the Taliban, and history in hindsight is never a healthy practice. And on the issue of Saddam, I think this one was spawned by a single blurry image of him shaking Mr. Rumsfeld’s hand that spread virally like wildfire. All it would have taken was 5 minutes of research to discover the ground-breaking truth that the US never delivered weapons of any sort to Saddam, it simply declared that it took side with Iraq with its war against Iran, which was at the time a more threatening entity. You can criticise their lesser of two evils approach, but you’d by lying if you suggested we gave him his WMD.
These are urban legends of the most revolting and dangerous strain, and can be so easily relegated by simple historical record that it proves leftists are not serious scholars or thinkers, but instead docile fools who willingly prostitute their brains for the sheer thrill of subscribing to the most absurdist conspiratorial charges imaginable. Its as if they think by making these bold remarks “we created al-Qaida!” and “Saddam was our puppet!” usually with a clever little smirk on their face, as if saying “I know so much more than you”, never offering an iota of substantiation, its as if they think they have the intellectual higher ground. How unfortunate they’ll never be bright enough to understand the irony.
Why are liberals so content with assailing the war on terror? Are they concealing some sort of inner-sadist pathology, knowing that because of their failure to prevent this war people are better off? That Afghanistan is rid of the tyrannical tribalist totallitarian demagogery of the Taliban? That a psychopath war-monger like Gaddafi has finally been disarmed of his very real and tangible weapons of mass destruction, an event that would have been impossible without the invasion of Iraq, a fact casually glossed over by the left? That for the first time ever Iraq has the chance to cast off its decrepit shackles of servitude and can hold its own elections? That Iraq’s GDP per capita is now actually higher than it war prior to the invasion? Are they really resentful of all this? Or are they just too cowardly to admit their folly?
All the shameless piffle of liberal politics aside, it is of the utmost importance that we aid the Iraqi resistance in its struggle against the sadists and murderers of the jihad. We must stand by the valiant and noble secular Kurdish militia outfit the Peshmurga, who’s efforts have elevated the status of Kurdistan by quantum leaps and bounds. We need to be resiliant against AQM’s (Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia) presence in Iraq, and we’re winning, every serious observer has remarked that their forces are being diminished and they are being driven into the dark where they belong. Even the schizmatic interface of the Sunni-Shia conflict is being slowly mediated. All in all, departure any time soon from Iraq would be tantamount to suicide for our interests and homicide for the interests of those whom we aimed to liberate.
We’re fighting a long-haul war against an entire nihilistic philsophy of “homicidal-suicide” a horrid and purely evil convention of death conceived by the Islamists and a first for human experience. They seek not the end of history, but the reversion of history, subverting modernity itself, turning back the clock to a perpetual age of bedouin mysticism and barbarism and theocratic Sharia fascism.
The enemy we face is cunning, and takes numerous forms, from the turban-clad warlords of Kandahar to the Saudi plutocracy terror financiers in their palaces, to the Islamist lobbyists under the guise of politically-correct institutions of peace like CAIR and quite potentially people like Keith Ellison. This is no time to back down or retreat, these people desperately require Westernization. Some have the potential to fight for it themselves, like the secularists in Tehran. Others, like the Iraqia and Syrians, can’t do it by autonomously, and require third-party intervention. In any case, whether they like it or not, in the long-run it is absolutely imperative that the societal plague that is Islamist fascism be purged from the face of the earth once and for all.
We cannot delude ourselves into believing that this will be a quick and quaint enterprise; the transition from years of fundamentalist oppression, inhumanism and bodily and mind enslavement to free-willed democracy will be a long one. Blood and tears will be shed, and the ultimate goal of democratic civil societies engendered from the rubble of theological ghettos will not be immediately realized. In some cases where Islamism is rampant the brutal, but ultimately just and necessary policies of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk must be replicated in order to nullify the power of terrorists and thugs to imtimidate the populous from excercising freedom, something they loathe to the pits of their stomachs.
Ultimately the transitional paradigm shift from theocratic fascism to secular democracy in the Middle-East and abroad will operate on a principle I have christened “the changing of the guard”. Purge the provocateurs of intellectual-regression and hate-mongering religious bigotry from the mosques, school curriculum, politicians and likewise. Destroy the ideology at its roots, cleanse it completely from all societal apparatuses, make certain the sensitivities of children will not be impacted or influenced by fundamentalist indoctrinating forces.
In the consequenting void introduce and re-inforce the teachings of the secular Western tradition, conditioning the young to embrace the superiority of the Enlightenment values versus the rot of religious zealotry. Then wait patiently for a new generation to take control of their country and expel the parties of God from corroding their lands once and for all, we’re already seeing the beginnings of this concept in the streets of Tehran, where the concentration of pro-American sentiment vastly dwarfs that of San Francisco, and the Khomenistas are increasingly losing their totallitarian foothold. Again none of this can be achieved in a short interval of time, within the Iranian microcosm it took decades, but the results we are attempting to fulminate are not simplistic ones. Vigilance is an absolutely paramount virtue here, but we can be consoled by the fact that history is on our side.
One thing is clear, as in the words of political dissident Syed Ibrahim whilst in prison detention in Egypt, without the emancipation of Iraq and the onset of the first free, democratic election in the country’s history, without this, the engagement of the call for freedom and humanity in a region so hopelessly deprived of both, the prospects for finally ending the legions of the totallitarian neo-caliphate and triumphing in the war on terror would be rendered moot. The clash for civilization we find ourselves entangled in will be brutal indeed, but the cause is endearing and the consequences for acquiescence would be catastrophic. There is absolutely no room for the whims of the parochial and the cynic.
I’ve now capitulated on the catagorical imperatives underlying neoconservativism. But in order to fully apperciate and subscribe to them, it is vital that we observe the alternative: political liberalism.
Let us stipulate a scenario in which this so-called “liberal anti-war” faction had its goals and convictions reflected in foreign policy. Had these people been listened to, the Vietnam War would have fulminated in a shameful retreat by American forces, precipitating in a turbulently violent bloodbath; obviously this particular situation was actually realized. Moreover, the Soviet Union would have succeeded in its expansionalistic ambitions and the nihilists of the Red Army would have encroached themselves throughout Europe. Slobodan Milosevic (incidentally a man who was being supplied with armaments by his fellow tyrant Saddam Hussein) would have succeded in his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, and Bosnia would have been consolidated into a greater Serbian Yugoslavia. The Taliban would have still retained their theocratic stranglehold and Afghanistan would still cater to Bin Ladin and his thugs as guests of the state. And finally, Saddam Hussein would not only still be perpetuating his fascistic massacre-machine within his own country, but would have also succeeded in annexing the autonomous member of the UN and Arab League Kuwait.
How is it that the left so routinely boasts that its the party of “human rights” while retaining such a disgraceful track-record for disdaining them? I said “so-called” anti-war faction for a reason, the above episodes were not exemplaries of pacifism, they demonstrated a sado-masochistic desire to ignore the victims and pity their demented murderers. This testifies to the failure of the left: traditionally it was supposed to operate under the conditions of upholding the rights of all people, but now it has just become a cheap bumper sticker avenue for conceited activists. It is in this way that neoconservativism fills the void, raising the banner of classical liberalism when the left itself does not.
The root cause of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism gravitates from the mind-cancer that is multicultural relativism, the pseudo-philosophy that dictates there is no objective standards by which comparative judgements can be drawn between differing socities. Essentially it argues that there is no real truth, no culture is superior to another because everythings just relative to one another, everything is equal. This is the masochistic bile spewed by all the liberal savants: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, and innumerable others. Ultimately it comes down to an incredibly elusive brand of nihilism, a rejection of any sense of metaphysical or realisitic objective standard, absolving one of the tedious burden of “knowledge” of other cultures and instead substituting it with the false antithesis that we are to be infatuated with all cultures, consequenting in truly respecting none of them.What does this mean? This means that liberals are incapable of recognizing the universal rights of man, that no such rights exist, that the rights of man are instead contigent upon the culture to which they are situated within, and all cultures are relative to one another and thus equal. So theres no point in even debating such things as delivering people from tyranny, who’s to say our culture is any better?
This is the utterly contemptible intellectually-regressive opiate of the ignorant and the cynical. There are cultures whom are superior to others, and we will not be content with the oppression of our fellow man just because its relatively just in accordance to their backwards cultures. We will not allow women to be subjugated as chattel, apostates and unbelievers to be murdered, homosexuals to be slaughtered and civil liberties to be evaporated just because its sanctioned as the divine ordinance of God by an arcane book filled with lies and superstitions. It may be justified in Islamic culture, but not in ours, and we have the higher ground. We in the west must hereby resolve that we liberate all the populations of the enslaved from their fascist overlords and will not be stopped in our ambition by the nihilistic stupidity of multicultural etiquette.
But we must proceed with purity. Some evangelical conservatives like Ann Coulter have made incendiary remarks that we should “invade their countries and convert them to Christianity”. This Falwellian bile is infinitely detrimental to our cause; this shouldn’t be a war between radical Christianity and radical Islam, this should be a war between secular autocratic modernity and theocratic fascist medievalism. Luckily, the neoconservative faction isn’t populated by ugly sophomoric broads like her.
Earlier I articulated as to why this isn’t a Zionist crusade, as liberals commonly charge. But now I would like express why this shouldn’t be a Zionist cause. There most definitely is a militaristic Palestinian faction in the form of HIzbollah and Hamas, and they must be ruthlessly contended with. They’ve subverted the anguish of their people into fascist violence and seek not the liberation of Palestine and the peaceful emergence of a two-state solution, but the theocratic imposition of Palestine throughout the territories through the complete annihilation of Israel. This is non-pardonable and will be dealt with accordingly.
but there most definitely are Israeli madmen as well. General Sharon illegally annexed territories in the West Bank and Gaza even during the Oslo accords, and Israel has continually abused its provincial rights, displacing millions of people in an already wretched position. Its easy to see why even a Palestinian secularist could be infuriated by such encroachments upon his own land. This is the same fundamentalist bile, just under the banner of a different holy book.
Too much time has passed, too much evasion of this problem. To be fair, President Bush has been the only American president to use the term “Palestinian state”, but far more needs to be done. The territories must be forcefully reverted back to their 1947-1948 jurisdictional conditions; if either party, Israeli or Palestinian, betrays these perimeters then they will suffer the consequences.
This may very well require the eviction of certain parties, polls have always shown that the large moderate populations on both sides have always been seeking two-state solutions, but have had their ambitions squashed due to the extremists on both sides, Hizbollah and Hamas for Palestine and Likud for Israel. Again a perfectly mediatable conflict is rendered impossible because of religious interference. This is a war against the arcanum of theocratic imperialism, justice must be brought to Islamist and Zionist alike. 9/11 was not triggered by the Palestinian-Israeli question, but it at least invigorated us to finally answer it. If God doesn’t want to deliver his chosen people from squalor (whoever they are), then we will.
And again, “of course” all Muslims are not Islamists, but it would be fair to state that mostly all Muslim protestors are Islamists. As Irshad Manji has pointed out, the burden of a secular Islamic renaissance rests upon the Muslim population itself.
This is an incredibly multi-faceted conflict we are now facing, and its components are changing and evolving in near perpetuity. We need to be very smart about our moves, and make them with knowledge and strong willpower. Surely mistakes have been made, had Bush listened to the neoconservative base and invaded with a drastically larger force, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the same scope of volatility we now face.
For those still skeptical of the tenability of the seemingly tremendous objectives we are seeking here, I submit simple historical analysis. Recall that prior to the American invasion and re-animation of Germany and Japan in its own image, these odious behemoths were arguably theocratic slave-states. The fuhrer was afforded the respectability and obedience of an avatar of God, and the Japanese emperor was all but God himself; he was thought to have divine ordinance and ancestry, this pales even the Khomeni regime as mild.
Now decades later, after America forcefully and violently absolved the Axis Powers of their fascist barbarism and imbued its own values and infrastructure, both states boast some of the most impressive and formidable economies in the world. I believe this precedent can be replicated in the Middle-East, it will take a great deal of time and blood will be shed, but the cause is undeniabily just. Neoconservatism doesn’t have to prove anything, history speaks for itself. One thing remains constant, the fate of the world is in the balance. Will we be neoconservatives and take initiative ensuring that our future won’t be compromised? Or will we be liberal apologists and pacifists and apathetic superficialists, calling the only faction serious about stopping terrorism fascists, and then sympathising with real fascists?
The choice is yours, America, we are at a crossroads.
The clock is ticking.
Is it so wrong to agree with the (ostensible) goal but despise the method? a complete retraction of individual civil liberties is no way to fight the scourge of terrorism, and all it does is make the rallying cry of ‘freedom’ seem ever more hollow. what is the point in fighting this way if by doing so we lose little by little the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (if there were that many to begin with)?
I think the best way to deal with terrorists is through the methods arising from and within our own democratic, rule-of-law systems; through court processes respecting the principles of innocent until proven guilty, unlawful search and seizure, not holding without sentencing, a statutory limitation on detention, habeus corpus and posse comitatus, all of which ‘dear leader’ George W Bush seems to think are little more than fripperies unneccessary for western civilisation. we cannot let this man or his government represent the face of freedom; he makes it a laughing stock.
“sniff, sniff”
Oh, my! Do I smell the repulsive, unmistakable rancid stench of….a liberal strawman? And it rears its hideous face so freely right out of the blue, before even the bulk of its trite and simpering little tract has even been composed…
“A complete retraction of civil liberties”? You must be joking. You think the Patriot Act is a fascist implement do you? You think wire-tapping (something that has proven effective and is freely excercised in Europe, by the way) is a harbinger of the re-surgence of the Gestapo?
My my, what would you mutinous beetles ever think if we placed you in Tehran or Riyadh? Try to find your civil liberties and rights over there eh?
But really, I’m curious: do you honestly believe that you have relenquished even a remotely significant denomination of your rights? Really? Or is that some blasted MoveOn.org bumper sticker you’ve been told to memorize?
I would be the first one protesting if the US saw the return of internment camps and socio-political dissention-nullifying mechanisms, I’m a neolibertarian. But the fact of the matter is no such ghastly bogeymen exist, they’re invented by the left for their own political advantage, and, more subversively, to compromise the prosecution of the war effort.
I don’t know about you, but I find that reprehensible.
well, the point is moot: i’m an Australian, we don’t have a bill of rights, so in many ways we are worse off (theoretically) than you are.
so I really cannot say if American citizens have relinquished their rights, or if they feel as if they have; I don’t know.
but I notice you have not dealt with the other issues I have raised: posse comitatus is gone, unlawful search and seizure (stories of those new hastily trained US Air Marshals) detention without charge for unspecified amounts of time, habeas corpus. isn’t this all true, or is it again just liberal chin wagging?
fuck liberals and fuck terrorists; seriously, fuck ‘em. but don’t try to paint George W as some staunch defender of secular modernity. politicians with faith will always have their politics influenced by it, it is nigh impossible for the public and private man to completely separate. I respect the separation of church and state but it seems in his own way he is trying to attack these barriers. faith based initiatives, attempted anti-abortion legislation (if there was ever a time we needed to slaughter our kids, or perhaps the terrorist’s kids, it is now, to conserve resources, haha) intelligent design taught in schools, come on now, does this sound like a secularist to you?
in any case, let’s not get sidetracked. the methods of investigative police work, in line with the law, respecting the rights of the suspects (yes, even terrorists should be entitled to due process – it shows we are better than them) in the manner created by our modern constitutional and common-law societies, remains THE BEST method of dealing with internal and external threats. the unlawful detention of david hicks and his show trial is a sham and a fiasco and does nothing more than illustrate that the government does not respect the institutions it is touting as superior to sharia law countries like Iran.
moreover, let’s agree that George Bush should have invaded Iraq and captured and tried Saddam – the FIRST George Bush. pulling out of the first Gulf War was a huge mistake that America is paying for today. George Bush #1 should have finished the job, and secured a free and democratic Iraq the first time around. that at least might have had a shot at working. what happened is that the US pulled out when it was convenient for it to do so, and the Iraqi people undoubtedly suffered a blow to their faith in the US as a saviour. your thoughts?
Look, I’m no Bush cheerleader. I’d much rather have William Kristol or even more so Mark Steyn or Christopher Hitchens as my chief executive. But I do not believe this is a religious struggle. Bush’s own church, the United Methodist, was vehemently opposed to the regime change in Iraq. As were nearly every other Christian church, if this is a religious struggle (as it shouldn’t be) it would appear that the churhces are completely useless in the affair. Indicating that its not, Bush is a somewhat simple, rhetorically unlettered person, but he’s damn right on something many, many people are hopelessly wrong about.
Its liberal chin wagging. The vast majority of detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere have proven to be jihadists, and they relenquished every last right the moment they screeched “ALLAH AKBAR!” whilst blowing up innocents. Letting them free would be the act of a treacherous jihadist collaborator, as is permeated by this new story:
http://www.kansascity.com/news/world/story/203827.html
Prove that we’re better? We ARE better, we don’t have to prove ANYTHING to ANYONE. Are’s is a culture of civility and kindness and science and philosophy and ingenuity and prosperity and reason. Theirs is aculture of suicide, hatred, murder and totallitarianism. The notion that we need to somehow substantiate our moral and intellectual superiority by affording rights to our murderers is patently absurd.