"If al-Qaida was not in Iraq before we invaded, why did we invade?" Buchanan serves it up.

We have some real zingers from Buchanan this morning. Buchanan must have dined at the Palm for inspiration for this column. - Hat tip: Cutler

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Onward the Revolution!
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Having cheerfully confessed he knows little about economics, John McCain is advancing himself as a foreign-policy president, a "realistic idealist," he told the World Affairs Council of Los Angeles.

But judging from the content of his speech, McCain is no more a realist than he is a reflective man.

Speaking of our five-year war in Iraq, McCain declares, "It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possible genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible and premature withdrawal."

Fair point. There is surely a great risk in a too-rapid withdrawal.

But if a U.S. withdrawal, after 4,000 dead and 33,000 wounded, and a trillion dollars sunk, runs the risk of a genocidal calamity, what does that tell us about the wisdom of those who marched us into this war?

What threat did Saddam ever pose comparable to the cataclysm McCain says we face if we pull out? Who, Senator, put American on the horns of so horrible a dilemma?

"Whether they were in Iraq before is immaterial," McCain warns, "al-Qaida is there now." And that is surely true.

But if al-Qaida was not in Iraq before we invaded, why did we invade? And if al-Qaida is there now, what was the magnet that drew them in, if not the U.S. occupation McCain himself championed?

Like Condi Rice, who regularly disparages the policies of every president from FDR to Bill Clinton, McCain enjoys parading the higher morality of his devotion to democracy-uber-alles.

"For decades in the Middle East we had a strategy of relying upon autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family. ... We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on these outdated autocrats is the safest bet." Speaking of self-delusion, does McCain believe the "democrats" lately elected in Pakistan will be tougher on al-Qaida and the Taliban than Pervez Musharraf, who has twice escaped assassination for having sided with us?

Does McCain think this new crowd in Islamabad will be more pro-American than the general, when the people who voted them in are among the most anti-American in the Islamic world?

From Richard Nixon to George Bush I, we expelled Moscow from Egypt, won the Cold War, brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and created a worldwide alliance, including Hafez al-Assad of Syria, that drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait.

What has the Bush-McCain democracy crusade produced, save electoral victories for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas? And if we dump the sultan of Oman, President Mubarak, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who does McCain think will replace them?

If undermining Arab autocrats is good for America, why is that also the goal of Osama bin Laden?

McCain proposes a "League of Democracies" to unite a hundred nations for peace and freedom. "Revanchist Russia," however, is to be black-balled from McCain's league and thrown out of the G-8.

What would this accomplish other than undoing the work of Reagan in bringing Moscow in from the cold, driving Russia into the arms of China, restarting the Cold War and recreating the Beijing-Moscow axis it was Nixon's great achievement to break up?

What McCain is proposing is a re-division of the world into the forces of light and the forces of darkness. Moral clarity at last! Has he forgotten the fate of that earlier rabbit warren of the righteous, the League of Nations?

Does our "realistic idealist" think a NATO of 25 nations that has mustered a piddling 16,000 soldiers, most of them noncombatants, to stand beside us in Afghanistan is going to confront a nuclear-armed Russia?

"Nations have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies. Only permanent interests," said Lord Palmerston.

What is critical, especially in wartime, is not whether a regime is autocratic or democratic, but whether it is hostile or friendly.

Gen. Washington, at war with democratic Great Britain, is said to have danced a jig when he heard we had Louis XVI as an ally. During our Civil War, Britain built blockade-runners for the Confederacy, while the czar docked his ships in Union harbors. Russia "was our friend/When the world was our foe," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes.

When Nixon launched his airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, autocratic Portugal let us use the Azores. Democratic France denied Reagan over-flight permission in the 1986 raid on Libya. Two brave U.S. pilots died as a result. When McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton, British and French ships were unloading goods in Haiphong, while Ferdinand Marcos and the South Korean generals sent troops to stand with us and fight beside us.

To root one's attitude toward nations based upon their internal politics rather than their foreign policies is ideology. And policies rooted in ideologies, from Trotskyism to democratism, end up on the Great Barrier Reef of reality.

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AMEN.

Jettison Bush Legacy: Open Borders, Globalism, Interventionism and Big Government Conservatism.

October 05, 2007
A New 'New Majority' for GOP?
By Patrick Buchanan

With President Bush reaching new lows in national polls, Christian conservatives threatening to bolt if Rudy is the nominee and the Iraq war bleeding support in Middle America, Republicans are in a funk about 2008.

And understandably and deservedly so.

The war, a product of hubris, born of the smashing triumph in Afghanistan, and ideology, a Wilsonian vision of democratizing the Middle East, has been a disaster for the country, and the party that plunged us into it. And the Bush amnesty for illegal aliens ignited a rebellion that dealt the establishment its worst thrashing in many moons.


Free trade has cost 3 million manufacturing jobs, sent the dollar plunging to peso levels, denuded America of productive capacity and left us dependent on Chinese loans to finance $800 billion trade deficits.

So, are Republicans doomed to defeat in 2008? By no means.

For the performance of the Congress and Democratic field of presidential hopefuls should be troubling to any Democrat with visions of winning back the White House.

Congress has failed to end U.S. involvement in Iraq, or to contain the surge, or impose its formula for fighting the war, leaving the party base in sputtering, exasperated, impotent rage.

Why has Congress failed? Because it is terrified of the possible consequences of imposing its policy. Congress fears Bush may be right -- that a rapid troop withdrawal risks a strategic disaster and humanitarian catastrophe. Having been lacerated for the loss of Eastern Europe to Stalin, of China to Mao, and of Southeast Asia to Hanoi, they desperately do not want to be held responsible for losing Iraq to Islamic radicalism.

On social and cultural issues, Democrats seems to have learned nothing.

In the last presidential debate, at Dartmouth, Bill Richardson said that, as president, he would refuse the honorary chairmanship of the Boy Scouts. Why? Well, the Boy Scouts does not allow homosexual scoutmasters to take Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts on camping trips.

All the Democratic candidates but Hillary favored a federal law banning smoking in public places. Would that mean U.S. attorneys prosecuting bartenders for letting patrons puff away. Are Democrats going to take the nanny state national? Do they think Middle America is Mike Bloomberg's Manhattan?

All the Democratic candidates except Dennis Kucinich favored the Federal requirement that states outlaw drinking by 18-year-olds, which means high school kids who join the Marines can't have a night of beer with their buddies before heading to Anbar.

All the Democratic front-runners favored second-graders being read stories in school about a homosexual marriage between a pair of princes. This would result in the absurdity of 6-year-olds, forbidden by the U.S. Supreme Court from learning about God, Adam and Eve in school, being introduced to sexual unions between Adam and Steve. America is just not that far down that road.

Following the debate, Hillary Clinton proposed giving a $5,000 "baby bond" to every child born in the United States. This would add $20 billion to federal spending yearly, with the main beneficiary being illegal aliens who average more than three babies each.

The message that would go out to the world: If you're pregnant, get a visa and fly to the United States -- or, if you can't get a visa, get across the Mexican border. Because if your baby is born here, you hit the jackpot. The baby is an automatic U.S. citizen and entitled to a $5,000 Hillary "baby bond" you can take back to Mexico, if the feds catch you and boot you out.

In short, Democrats sense their vulnerability on the war and security issue, which is why they are frustrated and floundering in Congress and stiffing the antiwar base of the party. And they remain vulnerable on social and cultural issues, if Republicans have the nerve to hammer them, as Bush's father did in that miraculous summer of 1988, when he turned a 17-point deficit to Michael Dukakis on Aug. 1 into an eight-point lead by Labor Day that he never lost.

If Barack is the Democratic nominee, nervousness over a president three years out of the Illinois legislature will play to the GOP's advantage in wartime. Hillary as the nominee, with 45 percent of the country saying it would never vote for her and the nation given eight months to reflect on whether they want to watch a four-year rerun of the Bill and Hillary Show, would also work to GOP advantage.

Republicans may not have The Gipper around to unite them, but they do have Hillary, which is an excellent second best.

Moreover, of the front-running Republican candidates, all are fresher than Hillary. All could campaign as a "change agent" in the current cliche. But they would need to jettison the Bush legacy: open borders, globalism, interventionism and Big Government Conservatism.

While the battleground states will be the same, the battleground constituency in 2008 is independents and Democrats earning $25,000 to $50,000. Before Bush embraced neoconservatism, they used to be known as Reagan Democrats. Though alienated, they are not yet lost.