Conservatives love to talk about government overreach and the myriad ways that the regime in Washington is violating our constitutional rights. But if our policies are bad for human rights here in America, then why assume that the regime is a force for good everywhere else in the world?
The
airstrike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani and brought the
United States to the brink of war is now two weeks in the past, most of the shouting
has died down, and it now looks like my initial prediction was right
after all: namely, that America would continued to avoid war with Iran.
It wasn’t
easy: nothing riles up the Iranians like a good martyrdom, and when the martyr
was so revered that sixty people got trampled to death in the funeral procession,
Iran’s leaders were constrained to do something to preserve their
national honor. So they launched a wave of ballistic missiles at two American
bases in Iraq, and told the Iranian people that eighty Americans had been
killed.
In
reality, nobody was killed, as the missiles were carefully targeted to strike
empty buildings. But America got the message – we can destroy your
bases, if you keep pushing us – and Donald Trump chose not to escalate
things any further. Meanwhile, most of America’s NATO allies are now
withdrawing their troops from Iraq, with only the United Kingdom standing by
the United States’ decision to blatantly violate Iraqi sovereignty.
While the
Iraqi government itself will probably prove too pusillanimous to enforce its
own resolution and expel the remaining foreign troops, the loosely organized
Shi’a militias that make up the majority of Iraq’s armed forces are not so
patient. They will muster their troops for battle, and methinks that the occupation
force’s days are numbered.
Overall,
this looks like a clear strategic win for Iran. It is an old principle of
military scheming, going back at least to Sun Tzu, that to fracture the enemy’s
alliances is better than a direct attack. And after what has
happened in the Middle East over the past two weeks, America has very few
allies left.
But now
that the dust has settled, and most Americans have gone back to watching the
Senate prepare to acquit Donald Trump, we are left with an important question:
where were the constitutionalists when this happened?
I’m
talking about the large faction of the Republican party which likes to complain
about federal overreach, usurpation of the powers of Congress by other branches
of government, and general violations of the constitutional limits that the
Founders tried to set for the government they organized.
Just consider
the case of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who ran for president four years ago on a
bunch of pompous rhetoric about restoring the constitutional balance of power,
but who now led the Senate in passing a resolution praising Donald Trump for
his unilateral act of war.
Apart
from Ron Paul, Tucker Carlson, and a few other dissidents, most of those who
pass for small government conservatives today have no major disagreements with
the present foreign policy, based, as it is, on neoconservatism, the Bush
Doctrine of preventive war, and the unwritten axiom that the world has room for
only one sovereign nation.
When you
really think about it, this is a strange paradigm through which to see the
events of our day.
On the
domestic front, the typical right-winger sees a government which is too large, which exerts too much
control over its people, whose policies are beholden to a variety of monied
interest groups, and which shows a crass disregard for innocent life (for
instance, by funding abortion).
But
abroad, the United States is an unalloyed force for good. We are on the right
side of every conflict we enter. Our wars, declared or otherwise, are always
legal and just. Our soldiers are always liberators. Our enemies are always
terrorists. Monied interests, like the arms industry and the oil industry, are
never a factor. And civilian casualties are never numerous enough to lead us to
question the justice of our cause.
In short,
there is a particular worldview, prevalent on the American right, in which,
here at home, the United States has spent nearly a century sliding away from
its founding principles and destroying the liberties of its own citizens, while
remaining a great defender of human rights abroad.
Then
there is the level-headed view of people like Ron Paul, in which a government
that acknowledges no constitutional limits will wreak havoc both at home and
abroad. But that view represents only a small minority of the Republican party.
Now I
want to make myself clear: just because I say that the last two decades of US
involvement in the Middle East have been a disaster for human rights does not
mean that I lionize Iran.
But I do
believe in Iraq’s right, as a sovereign nation, to say yes or no to foreign
military activities within its territory. And I think that the fact that most
members of the anti-ISIS coalition considered Iran to be a valuable ally, which
they could work with peacefully, means that the United States could probably
have done the same. And I reject any claim that our bombing campaigns in Syria,
Libya, and Yemen have led to any increase in those countries’ freedom
commensurate with the human cost.
And I
think that the demand for oil is a major driving force in all American
involvement in the Middle East. How else do you explain how the usual
indignation towards the “terrorists” is suspended when Saudi Arabia is
involved? It’s hard not to admit that the people who killed a dissident
journalist in Turkey and hid the body in the Saudi consulate had done more than
enough to get themselves designated as terrorists and blown to smithereens in a
drone strike, if they had been working for any other country.
And yet
the United States still sells billions of dollars worth of armaments to Saudi
Arabia every year.
Most
American conservatives, while they are good at pointing out domestic violations
of our inalienable rights, have refused to see all this.
Such
cognitive dissonance isn’t born of rational thought; rather, it’s a tribal
thing. If you’re a conservative in this country, then you probably identify as
an American and a Republican. As a Republican, you look at all the ways that your
rivals, the Democrats, have expanded the power of government over the past
century, and you see rampant violations of various constitutional rights. But
as an American, you look at the US armed forces, wherever in the world they may
be, and whatever they may be doing, as liberating heroes.
By saying
that this is tribal thinking, I don’t mean to imply that it’s confined to the unsophisticated
masses. Just look at William J. Bennett, the man who served as Ronald Reagan’s
Secretary of Education, and later wrote the US history textbook that I used in
high school.
The text
has two volumes: the first runs from colonial times to about 1913, and the
second from World War I to the end of the Reagan Administration. The founders
and the constitution they wrote are praised effusively. Abraham Lincoln is
praised for saving the Union and abolishing slavery. Franklin Roosevelt is
criticized for the New Deal, but praised for his leadership during World War
II.
The man
who comes in for the most criticism is Jimmy Carter: the chapter about him is
titled “The Years The Locusts Ate,” and is all about how his weak leadership
allowed Americas enemies, especially Iran, to win victories all over the world.
(Nothing at all is said about the CIA-backed coup in 1953 that made the Iranian
people hostile toward America in the first place.)
The man
who comes in for the most praise is Ronald Reagan. His military adventurism is
presented in a purely positive light. All the talk about the separation of
powers from Volume 1 is conveniently absent. When the Russians shot down an
airliner full of Americans and Koreans in 1983, Bennet waxes eloquent about
what a tragedy it was. (When the Americans did the same thing to an Iranian
airliner in 1988, it got no mention at all.) Finally, the whole book concludes with
a speech by Reagan about how America is the “Shining City on a Hill” which the
whole world should aspire to be like.
Oh,
did I mention that, according to Bennett, this all happened while the US government was contributing to the deaths of several tens of
millions of innocent people? That started in 1973 – Bennett takes the usual
conservative position that abortion is murder, and quotes Byron White’s dissent
from Roe v. Wade about “Raw Judicial Power” and how outrageously awful it is
for the rights of so many people to be abolished in such a blatantly
undemocratic manner.
You
may or may not agree with Bennett’s take on abortion rights, but either way,
doesn’t it seem a bit strange that a man can accuse his own government of mass
murder, and then a few pages later go back to talking about how great and how
free America is? Seldom does he question his country's status as the prime force for good in
the world. ‘Right to life or no right to life,’ he seems to be saying, ‘we’re
still the Shining City on a Hill.’
When
Bennett wrote a slim third volume to bring the history up to 2009, he managed
to work in justifications for both the first and second Gulf Wars, even though
everybody knew by then that the Iraqi nuclear program had never existed. Go
figure.
Even
Matt Walsh, one of the few conservative bloggers that I actually take seriously
enough to follow these days, can’t seem to see that there’s more to the
situation in the Middle East than Fox News might be letting on.
Here’s
the headline for his sole post discussing the death of Soleimani: Trump
Just Killed One Of The Most Dangerous Terrorists In The World, And Democrats
Are Upset About It.
Needless
to say, he doesn’t spare any time discussing the intricacies of what actually
happened and why. After one brief tirade, Walsh returned to his usual focus on
domestic issues. His next piece was headlined: Michelle
Williams Shouted Her Abortion At The Golden Globes. Here's The Most Disturbing
Part Of What She Said.
If you
read Walsh for a while, you’ll notice that he spends most of his time talking
about abortion, sex changes for children, abortion, consumerism, internet
porn, abortion, America’s awful public schools, Christians who go soft on
abortion, and, well, you get the picture. About 95% of what Matt Walsh writes
is meant to persuade his readers that the culture they live in is headed for
the ash heap of history.
So how in
the world does this man look at the wars going on in the Middle East and see a
black-and-white situation in which the United States somehow occupies the
“white” position?
It
doesn’t make a lot of sense. But then again, patriotic feelings are seldom
governed by logic. People have deeply ingrained emotional ties to a concept of
“the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” that has long since become untethered from the reality.
Chances are that if you’re reading this, then you are an old-fashioned constitutionalist who believes that the federal government is way more powerful than it was ever intended to be, that most policy coming out of Washington serves monied interests rather than the common people, and that any society that celebrates abortion the way ours does is a very selfish society with little regard for human rights.
And if you believe all that, then I think it’s time to admit that our foreign policy isn’t driven by a desire to protect the innocent, either.

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