Why Oppose Interventionism?
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because we know who promotes it and why
let'em fund their charities with their own soldiers and money
On Oct 10, 8:32 am, MJ <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Why Oppose Interventionism?What conservatives have forgotten – and libertarians rememberbyJustin Raimondo, October 10, 2011
> I often hear a variant of the following from conservatives (and some liberals) when confronted with theforeign policy viewsoflibertarians: "Sure, I'm all for a more peaceful foreign policy, but you guys take it too far – isolationism won't work in our increasingly interconnected world. Besides, we have real enemies we have to deal with."
> There are several problems with this response. First, there is no such thing as "isolationism" andno such creatureas an "isolationist." Sure, there are some who oppose international trade –labor unions, for one, and other "fair traders" – but libertarians are not included in their ranks. The "isolationist" label wascooked up by interventionistsas a scare word to define the terms of the foreign policy debate and smear their opponents as unrealistic troglodytes.The War Partyis the one really consistent advocate of what might be called isolationism: byforcefully interveningin the internal affairs of other nations, by occupying countries and effecting "regime change," we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and retreat into an imperialist cocoon, cutting off all normal – i.e.economicandsocial– relations, andlaying the groundworkfor the kind of "blowback" that results in terrorism directed against the US and its allies.
> Secondly, it would be impossible to take the principle of non-intervention "too far." Properly applied, that principle means US foreign policy is to be formulated and applied in accordance with the concept of non-aggression: that is, US policy would be consistent with thelibertarian axiomthat the initiation of force is always wrong, andalwayslead to bad results. Nothing bad can ever come of abjuring aggression. On the other hand, an inconsistent or erroneous interpretation of the non-interventionist principle could have equally disastrous results: e.g. the failure to repel an attack on the US in the mistaken belief that such an action would be "interventionist."
> Yes, but – our imaginary interlocutor might reply – weren't we attacked on 9/11, and aren't our actions since then fully justified?
> This brings us to an essential corollary of the non-aggression axiom: that retaliatory force is justifiedonly against those who initiate its use.Which means:invading Iraq– andoccupying Afghanistanforover a decade– is out of the question as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, as dramatic and earth-shaking as these actions were, did not bring us a single step closer to taking out Osama bin Laden and his cronies: that happened only when we engaged in the kind of old-fashioned and decidedly un-dramaticpolice workwhich enabled us to track the terrorist leader to his lair – and then we were in and out of there in a matter ofhours.
> All of which proves that weknowhow to go after terrorists and terrorism inthe right way– but we'd rather not, unless it's preceded by a long series of wars, because there's a whole other agenda behind our endless "war on terrorism." And with the extension of America's wars of aggressioninto Africa, and a "regime change" campaign underway againstIran,Libya, andgod-knows-who-else, that agenda is not hard to fathom.
> The United States has been lording it over the rest of the worldsince the end of World War II: the United Nations, anembryonic world government, was established at the behest ofAmerican elites. They saw it as the instrument of an emerging "world order" in which Washington, along with its junior partners inLondon,Paris, and –for a while– Moscow, would extend a controlling influence over the entire globe.
> During the cold war era, asramshackle Russiacowered under the pretext of "socialism in one country," while the US used anticommunist ideology as a rationale to buildan empire of bases– andUS-supported dictatorships– in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The interventionist impulse drove us to supportthe Afghan mujahideenin their war of "liberation" against the Soviets – and led to the peculiar concatenation of circumstances that made the creation of al-Qaeda possible.
> Funny how, at every turn, America's great "allies," who owed their continued existence to US generosity, wound up becoming our worst enemies. FromLend-Lease to Stalinto US aid to Afghan "freedom-fighters," the lesson of history is clear: blowback from one era wafts easily into another. We arestill payingfor the sins of our 20thcentury politicians.
> Not that our 21stcentury "leaders" are doing a better job: far from it. The post-9/11 era has seen us replicate every mistake we ever made,times ten. In its ferocity and scope, America's post-9/11 rampage has no precedent in history:the Mongol invasions, which depopulated large portions of Asia, and extended into parts of Europe, were sporadic by comparison with the relentless American march through the Middle East and Central Asia. It took Genghis Khan and his descendants a hundred years to build an empire on thescaleUS policymakers have constructed in just the last decade.
> The sheer velocity of intervention has picked up, as if our rulers are in an awful hurry to create that "world order" Washington policy wonks areconstantly telling usis necessary fortheirour own "security."
> This escalation, you'll note, coincides with theescalating economic crisisthat has gripped the international banking system based onfiat money and government debt– the biggestfinancial weaponsin the War Party's arsenal. Without the ability to "monetize" the debt – that is, "pay" the debt in devalued dollars issued by the Federal Reserve – America's matchless military machine and the empire it defends would not exist.
> The real estate "bubble," the hi-tech "bubble," and all the many instances ofmalinvestment created by the Federal Reserve– the "private"gang of banksterswho really run the US economy – have their reflection in the foreign policy realm. Sure, we're going bankrupt, yet you can be sure thebubbleof American imperialism is going to be the very last to pop. Our wise and benevolent rulers would sooner see 90 percent of homeownersforeclosedthan give up a single one of theircherishedcolonial possessions. In thedecadentand rapidlyfailingpolitical culture of what was once a great country, hubris is the defining characteristic of our elites.
> Libertarians oppose our foreign policy of global intervention because the history of America's wars is the story of how Big Government came to dominate the life of the nation. The outcome of every military conflict with the exception of the American Revolution has been a series ofunprecedented extensionsof government control into new areas. Wartime "temporary emergencies" inevitably hardened into routine regulations, and measures that were formerly unthinkable – e.g. Lincoln'sshutting down of opposition newspapers, Truman'sseizure of the steel millsduring the Korean War, the"PATRIOT" Act, etc. – entered the realm of possibility. In wartime, when expressions of dissent are met with "Don't you know there's a war on?", the collectivist mentality is dominant: the whole nation is militarized, and failure to march in lockstep is considered evidence of "treason." Libertytends to perishin such an atmosphere, as itnearly didin the war hysteria following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
> Libertarianism seeks to limit the power of government as much as possible. This means opposing the extension of governmental power in every instance,including its extension abroad. That's why conservatives, whoagreewith the libertarian program of cutting government to a bare minimum on the home front, are caught in an unsupportable contradiction. They are faced with the conundrum of opposing, say, aid to the elderly and sick in this country, while supporting "foreign aid" that supposedly advances our "national interest."
> In reality, the flow of American tax dollars abroad only advances the economic interests of ourthieving sock-puppets, and certain USexporters, who vacuum up those aid dollars as quickly as they are appropriated. In economic terms, the game of empire is a bust, a net loss by any measure. Conservatives used to know this. It was that old right-wing reactionaryGaret Garrett– prolific writer, noted editor, and prominent enemy of the New Deal – whosaidof the American Imperium that it is an empire without precedent in the history of the world because "everything goes out and nothing comes in."
> It was the conservatives ofGarrett's timewho were first accused of being the dreaded "isolationists," and now their lineal descendants hurl the same charge atus. That's due to a lapse of historical memory, the saddest case of political amnesia ever recorded. In their more reflective moments, conservatives may wonder why Big Government has only gotten bigger over the years, andneverany smaller. The best they've managed to do is todecrease the rate of increase– albeit only incrementally, and temporarily.
> Conservatives won elections, yet still the "march of progress" was always in the direction of bigger and more aggressive government. This happened, and continues to happen, due to their blind spot on the question of war and peace: thereflexive belligerenceof the cold war years, and theperseveranceof neoconservatism in spite of its catastrophic failures in the realm of policyandpolitics, has created an inner contradiction at the core of the modern conservative credo. Conservatives must choose between the moral and political strictures ofthe Constitutionand theperverse joysof militarism. We can have a republic, or we can have an empire: we cannot have both. It's as simple as that.
> Our message to American liberals varies very little from this essential axiom. The problem is that modern American liberals trace their ideological lineage back to the left wing of the New Deal, and are constantly invoking their hero,Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as an example for President Obama – their current hero – to follow. I'll bet the Japanese-Americans among their number are a little shocked to hear this, but being so very polite, they no doubt fail to remind their progressive friends of such inconvenient details as theinternment camps.
> In terms of sheer deceptiveness and demagogic power, no American president has ever been such an effective warmonger as FDR. He not onlylied us into war, as Clare Booth Luce so trenchantly put it, but he executed his war plan in such a manner as to make the next war – the "cold" war that sometimes got very hot – practically inevitable. Liberals who complain – rightly – about the erosion of civil liberties in Obama's (and George W. Bush's) America will find nearly all the legal precedents were set during FDR'slong and repressivereign.
> Yet the liberal-left of that time didn't make so much as a peep of protest as Japanese-Americans were hauled off to concentration camps, "subversive" newspapers were banned from the mails, and various dissidents on the right and the left were prosecuted for "sedition." Indeed, the left-wing media gloried in the persecution of the Japanese, with commie cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel, a.k.a. "Dr. Seuss," givingfull ventto the mostviciousbigotry – from a "progressive" and impeccably "anti-fascist" perspective, of course. WhenLawrence Dennis, a widely-read author and former US diplomat, was tried for sedition on the grounds that the pro-Hitler German American Bund hadcitedhis writings, the American Civil Liberties Union was nowhere to be found.
> Theneoconized conservativesand theObama-ized liberalsare immune to the anti-interventionist argument, and are quite naturally hostile to libertarianism. The only hope, if hope there be, is in the new movements that are emerging on both sides of the political spectrum: the so-called Tea Party, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which are both in rebellion – in their different ways – against the ideological status quo. While both are also misguided in their separate ways, it is only in the context of a serious rethinking of what it means to be on the "left" or the "right" that a real challenge to the War Party will emerge.
> There are many signs that this is happening, but it is too early to tell if these forces will ever jell into a unified movement with a coherent critique of the modern Warfare State. All we can do at the moment is to push both sides, ever so gently, inthe right direction, provide the space for a new realignment – and hope for the best.http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/10/09/why-oppose-interventionism/
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