Thursday, March 12, 2015

There is No Foreign Policy Expertise Except Conservatism!

    In regards to Iran we should let yesterday's stunt by GOP Senators serve as a reminder that conservative foreign policy is premised upon being tougher braver and manlier than the hippies and that there is simply no greater logic end or rationale beyond that.
 
 I recall reading about a plan in the aftermath of 9/11 for placing suspected terrorists in domestic prison from within the Bush administration. Or in other words a plan to treat them as if they were just another class of criminals from within the Bush administration, that supposedly shockingly weak option which only the most flaming liberals would consider sufficient for the most Evil Beasts to ever live.
  
The reasons for why this plan was scrapped in favor of Guantanamo and all the now familiar atrocities are in fact somewhat arbitrary. This conservative administration could have chosen to deal with terrorists through our civil law if different moods led to taking different advise or a butterfly flapped its wings. And if this had been the course that a Republican White House happened to choose we can be rest assured that conservatives would have considered it to be the self-evident, common sense default way that Strong Leaders deal with such evil, just as they consider the path of torture and secret confinement that 'their' administration did choose to be such a default in the path that our history happened to take. We should understand that these people are in no way hardened "realists". They are not rationally assessing the risk/reward values of different tactics and have no interest in trying to. Rather there is an emotional need to presume their own superior hardness that precedes whatever someone in their tribe might choose to do.
The second Iraq war was an obviously just act of self defense because conservative white men said so in a stern voice and because those damned alien hippies said that it wasn't. Benghazi is a 'scandal' because of the circular assumption that Democratic administrations are weak and that therefore anything that goes wrong in foreign affairs is proof of Democratic weakness. Negotiating with Iran is weak because a Democratic president is doing so, and never mind that negotiating with enemies has been utterly normal since the days when god-kings were building piles of severed heads.

    Just as there are people who are able to feel moral only in contrast to imaginary godless decadents or able to feel civilized only in contrast to ethnic Others foreign and domestic so there are those who are able to feel brave and strong only in contrast to cartoon straw hippies. There are such people in every society and it is only the happenstance of our military being uniquely powerful which makes our jingoists uniquely dangerous when they gain control of it. Meanwhile it is futile for Democrats to try to match a conservative measure of courage that it wholly fungible self serving and dare I say 'relativist'; as Kerry and Hillary Clinton famously did in voting for the Iraq War. You had might as well be the total peacenik that they shall will themselves into seeing you as no matter what you do.

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