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by Publius, November 9, 2005.
I must simply quote Thomas
Woods here: "I have never recommended a book as strongly as I am recommending Neoconned and Neoconned
Again, two new collections of essays that make just about every argument
you can think of against the war in Iraq. Now if you're thinking
that you've read enough about this subject already, or that such books
just aren't your cup of tea, or that you have too much to read as it is,
I urge you to abandon such thoughts right away. These books need
to be purchased by everyone, right away, this minute, and need to be circulated
just as far as possible.
I was
asked early last year to contribute an essay to these volumes. At
that time I was consumed by the task of writing The
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, along with my usual
dozen other projects, and unfortunately had to decline. All I can
say is, they sure didn't need my essay. Light in the Darkness Publications
has assembled one of the most impressive lineups of scholars and commentators
I have ever seen on any subject. Many of the names will be familiar
to LRC readers; see the list for
volume 1 here and volume 2 here.
Worth
the price of the two volumes alone is the very lengthy interview with the
late, great Jude
Wanniski, the supply-side theorist who had such influence on
President Ronald Reagan (and who therefore cannot be dismissed so easily
as a leftist peacenik). In recent years Wanniski had become -- along
with all too few other conservatives -- skeptical not only of government
intervention on the domestic front but of its foreign interventions as
well. (Recall Joe
Sobran's amusing dictum: if you want the government to intervene
domestically you're a liberal, if you want the government to intervene
abroad you're a conservative, if you want the government to intervene both
domestically and abroad you're a moderate, and if you don't want the government
to intervene either domestically or abroad you're an extremist.)
It may
sound like an exaggeration to say that just about every major claim made
about Iraq and Saddam by the U.S. government since the 1990 Iraqi invasion
of Kuwait has been misleading or simply false, and that the mainstream
media has bought into these distortions with nary a peep of opposition,
but that's just about the only conclusion one can draw from Wanniski's
case. If you think it's an open and shut case that Saddam "gassed
his own people," not to mention countless other episodes routinely cited
to work us into a frenzy for war, you need to read this. (Saddam
did brutally suppress uprisings against his regime, but violence in the
service of nationalism seems to disturb the neoconservative conscience
only selectively -- China and Iraq bad, Russia and the United States [under
Lincoln] good.)
Although not every essay touches on the issue explicitly, the first of
the two volumes is organized around Catholic Just War theory and what it
has to say about the war in Iraq. Now hold on a minute before
you say you're non-Catholic and just move along. The principles of
Catholic Just War theory, long appropriated and developed by a great many
non-Catholics, are widely regarded as useful tools for moral reflection,
and you'll be surprised at just how satisfying it is to see how dramatically
short the war in Iraq falls on the basis of every one of those principles.
Wanniski
also reminds us of the real history of the past 15 years. He recalls
the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, including the deliberate targeting
of water treatment facilities (followed by a sanctions regime that forbade
the entry into Iraq of equipment needed to repair them) and other installations
vital to civilian life. This was all necessary, say the shills, because
Saddam was such a bad person.
The sanctions, too, which led to half
a million children dead -- "worth it," according to Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, who did not question that figure -- were routinely
defended on the same grounds. (Wanniski also addresses the "if Saddam
hadn't built so many palaces he could have fed his people" argument.) A prosperous, secular country that was liberal by regional standards, and
which could boast one of the finest health care systems in the Middle East,
was reduced to an economic basket case, and plagued by a nightmare of disease,
malnourishment, and sick and deformed children -- all as the result of
a vain effort to dislodge its leader. If the "Saddam was bad" defense
strikes you as insufficient to justify the infliction of this degree of
suffering -- of which this is the tip of the iceberg -- welcome to the
human race.
That people
who describe themselves as Christians supported this policy is but the
icing on the cake. As I recall, there was a Christian theologian
of no small importance who condemned the idea that we should "do evil that
good may come."
A surprising
contributor to these volumes is Alfredo Cardinal
Ottaviani, who headed what in his day was known as the Holy Office of the
Catholic Church. Cardinal Ottaviani was known for his outspoken opposition
to the new rite of Mass, which he considered an intolerable liberal innovation,
so it would not be easy to accuse him of "liberalism." And yet the
editors include for us a wonderful and compelling essay of his called "Modern
War Is to Be Absolutely Forbidden." Let's see pro-war Catholics wiggle
out of this one.
Professor Peter Chojnowski, another traditional Catholic, contributes a
surprisingly radical essay on the right of conscientious objection. He reminds us of an important statement by the Ethics Committee of the
Catholic Association for International Peace six decades ago. That
committee included distinguished and orthodox scholars such as Msgr. Fulton
Sheen (who wrote scholarly books early in his career) and Msgr. John A.
Ryan. It concluded:
Practically speaking, the task
of deciding the justice or injustice of any particular war devolves upon
the conscience of the individual conscript or soldier. It is his conscientious
duty to decide, as a matter of concrete fact, whether any particular war
is aggressive or defensive, and, if defensive, whether it is justified
or unjustified, and, in consequence, whether he is free or obliged or forbidden
to participate formally in it, whether he is free or obliged or forbidden
to be a conscientious objector.
That's
another small taste of the hidden history that these books have made available.
Volume
2 is, if anything, more impressive still, and features a wider variety
of ideological perspectives. No, I don't much care for some of what Noam
Chomsky says, but I am prepared to give a respectful hearing
to anyone with the intelligence and the strength of character to denounce
wickedness and folly, especially this particular case of wickedness and
folly. Featuring an introduction by former UN weapons inspector Scott
Ritter, volume 2 includes dozens of essays by such authors as Claes Ryn, Kirkpatrick Sale, Alexander
Cockburn, Gordon Prather, Mark and Louise Zwick, Justin
Raimondo, Robert
Fisk, and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski.
Like many
Americans, I've grown sad and frustrated at the triumph of neoconservative
foreign policy. It was sold to Americans not merely on the basis
of lies, but also by means of bumper-sticker slogans trotted out -- and
dutifully absorbed and repeated by shills determined to live down to every
caricature of conservatism ever devised -- by a White House that cynically
exploited ordinary people's patriotic inclinations in order to prosecute
a war whose aims remain obscure to this day.
These
books, a small victory in themselves, actually lifted my spirits. It was a great pleasure to see how many serious, intelligent observers
were keeping a watchful eye on the Bush administration well before criticism
of the Iraq misadventure became fashionable, and to see their case against
it laid out with such devastating precision. That case is so powerful
and overwhelming that it will leave you more dumbfounded than ever that
anyone ever fell for it, that anyone got away with denouncing skeptics
of transparent White House propaganda as "unpatriotic," or that so many
people believe conservatism involves no higher value than giving intellectual
cover to a series of ever-changing, ad hoc rationalizations for war.
These
books deserve to become bestsellers. To those who opposed the Iraq
war, think of purchasing these books as casting a vote against the War
Party, against the war-war choice of Bush/Kerry that we got in 2004, and
against a cowardly, servile mainstream media whose mea culpas about pre-war
intelligence came, well, rather too late.
If you
have friends on the left or the right, or even in the center for that matter,
please forward this column to them. The same supposedly "liberal"
media that brazenly repeated White House fabrications that a simple Google
search could have refuted are unlikely to showcase these books. (Can
someone please remind the major conservative publications that the "liberal"
media supported this war with a vengeance?) They belong not only
in Americans' homes but also in classrooms, libraries (buy a set and donate
it!), and wherever intelligent Americans may be found.
Ordinary
Americans who were too busy with their own lives to investigate the administration's
claims too closely may come to see they've been had, if they haven't realized
it already. But the most outspoken of the war's supporters are all
but impossible to persuade. Some of them are simply venal, eager
to curry favor with the regime no matter how idiotic or intellectually
insulting the line they are expected to tow. Others, whether they
realize it or not, look at the world as a giant baseball game, with the
U.S. government as our team. They'll rush out of the dugout to protest
an obviously sound call at first base or a called strike that was in fact
well within the strike zone. When in matters of foreign policy their
team sets forth a barrage of propaganda they would have laughed at had
it come from the Soviet Union in the 1980s or Syria today, they cannot
defend it enthusiastically enough. Go, team.
Such a
juvenile mentality would have been considered utterly beneath conservatism
in, say, the 1940s. At that time, you could find major conservatives
who were willing to hold their own government to the same moral standards
they applied to others. Even a man known as "Mr. Republican," Senator Robert
Taft, could cast a skeptical eye on the Truman administration's
early Cold War foreign policy as -- no, this isn't a misprint -- gratuitously
provocative.
Today,
even to look for motivations behind 9/11 is to invite accusations of "blaming
America" for the attacks, as if a detective seeking a killer's motive should
be accused of blaming the victim for his fate. It is next to impossible
to render serious judgments about foreign policy when public discourse
is dominated by anti-intellectual hysterics calling themselves patriots. These two books do the best job yet.
It may
be worth noting, if only in order to underscore the intensity of my feelings
about these volumes, that not only do I have no relationship to Light in
the Darkness Publications, an imprint of IHS Press (no relation to the
Institute for Humane Studies), but I have actually had some public and
contentious exchanges with J. Forrest Sharpe, one of the editors of Neoconned,
on unrelated matters. I am happy to let bygones be bygones. Sharpe has done his country and the cause of truth a valuable service and
deserves only the most enthusiastic support.
It is
not possible to do these books justice in a single column. All I
can say is that they are of the utmost importance. I cannot urge
readers of this column strongly enough: put aside any inclination you may
have to let these volumes pass you by, or even to put off buying them until
a later date. Buy them right now. You will not regret it.
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