"America, Come Home" ... says an anti-war activist, but to no avail

Quite an eye-opener ... especially to those of us who opened our eyes to the dirty world of politics after 9/11.  While reading his article, let us also wish Justin Raimondo is quick and full recovery.
 

America, Come Home

Originally Posted March 28-30, 2001: The Best of Justin Raimondo

by Justin Raimondo Posted on November 22, 2018

Justin is recuperating from cancer treatment and under the weather for the next few days. However, we are able to offer some of his “best of” words here – the following columns are remarkably prescient, and, indeed, might have been written – why – yesterday! We at Antiwar.com have been monitoring the world and reporting since before 9/11/ 2001 – since before some of our readers were even born! So, here, we invite you to take a scary ride on the Justin Raimondo Way-Back Machine.

This morning’s [March 27, 2001] New York Times has yet another story about the developing split within the Bush administration over foreign policy, with the partisans of Donald Rumsfeld, unreconstructed cold warrior, versus Colin Powell’s (relatively) noninterventionist State Department. As is usual with the arbiter of the conventional wisdom, the Times defined the two camps in terms of “ideological conservatives” versus “moderates,” with the former allied with Rumsfeld and the latter partial to Powell. But in the post-cold war world, these categories make no sense at all: with the Soviet Union a fading nightmare, and America’s status as the last superpower left standing, the cold war paradigm simply does not apply. There is nothing inherently “conservative” in a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace: indeed, it seems like the sort of wild-eyed radicalism that energized the Napoleonic foreign policy of the French Revolution – the very antithesis of conservatism – and hardly a force for stability and the preservation of traditional values. But the Times has a natural predilection for mischaracterizing conservatives, for reasons too obvious to state, and, in any case, the right is very divided on foreign policy. Some, like Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, his neoconservative Svengali, seek to impose an American hegemony on the world, or most of it, and take great pride in a stubborn unilaterialism – even if it means a probable failure to reach their ostensible objectives (containing Saddam Hussein, avoiding all-out war in the Balkans, reducing the threat of a nuclear war, etc.). These ideologues are usually tagged with the term “neoconservative” as if to acknowledge, at least on some level, that this dogma of radical interventionism represents a revision – I would contend a complete reversal – of the original. But, as much as they would like to believe it, the neocons are not the whole show.

A DISSENTING MAJORITY
Others on the right have dissented from this would-be orthodoxy. The collapse of communism, the end of the cold war, and the troubling rise of threatening trends on the home front have all soured grassroots conservatives on the alleged necessity for the US to intervene on a global scale. Pat Buchanan’s critique of Western hubris has garnered considerable support on the right, even if his recent race for the White House did not, as conservatives wake up to the startling and darkly disturbing insight that the enemy is not in any foreign capital, but right here at home. These rightists, faced with the choice of bombing either Baghdad or Washington D.C., would more than likely choose the latter. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, the president of the Mises Institute; Donald J. Devine and David Keene, of the American Conservative Union; and of course the indefatigable scholars over at the Cato Institute, that bastion of libertarianism in the Beltway – all have proffered important critiques of the cold warrior-neoconservative stance, and their views more faithfully reflect the opinions of grassroots activists than the Beltway conservative ‘generals’ intent on re-fighting the cold war.

‘WORLD HEGEMONY’ OR BUST
The Kosovo war was a watershed for many grassroots conservatives: for the first time they began to see the actions of their government as not merely mistaken, but evil. They also began to see, with a new clarity, the domestic uses of our interventionist foreign policy, as Clinton bombed an aspirin factory in the Sudan to get Monica off the front pages. This revulsion at the policies of the most interventionist President since Teddy Roosevelt began to translate, after a while, into a broad criticism of interventionism in general............