Wednesday, March 12th, 2003
SHOWING THE TRUE COLORS OF THE ANTIWAR RIGHT’s HATRED:
Pat Buchanan, with his trademark bombastic style, has declared all-out war on his Neoconservative opponents – primarily those with Jewish surnames – but not exclusively. The key excerpt from Pat’s J’Accuse:
” We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity. “
Aside from Pat being wrong on nearly every substantive point – the Bush administration for example has been at great pains to indulge Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s continued tolerance for its subjects lavishing millions upon al Qaida – were he to prevail in his main goal of stopping the war against Iraq Buchanan would reap not security for America but this nation’s eventual ruin. The ruin would not be some far off day either but most likely within a generation at the outside.
Shortly after WWII there was a brief moment when it would have been theoretically possible to have put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. This was highly unlikely at best due to the nature of Stalin’s regime but when that moment passed, nuclear proliferation was the guaranteed result; first to the Soviets, then to our major allies the British and French. Possession of the bomb became a mark of great power status and it was vigorously pursued by Maoist China after Khrushchev refused to pass along nuclear secrets to Beijing. China, consumed in the ideological fury of the Cultural Revolution, brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust over a few worthless islands in the Ussuri river on their border with the Soviet Union. Now after ” India has stood up ” by testing nuclear weapons it is periodically on the brink of nuclear war with Pakistan over Kashmiri mountain peaks. North Korea, wracked by starvation and noteworthy only for the sheer size of its Gulags now has the bomb and is threatening to use it. Welcome to the future that Pat Buchanan would have for America – where every murderous, offal-pit dictatorial regime on earth can gain the ultimate weapon without risk and where a rogue state or terrorist thermonuclear detonation on American soil will come without a return address.
As in 1945 we are at a rare window of opportunity that will change the course of history. Either the United States deals with Iraq, Iran and North Korea by various means including war if need be to establish the principle that the Nuclear Club is now closed or we have resigned ourselves to a world of uncontrolled proliferation of the most terrible weapons to the planet’s worst regimes. Terrorist groups will not be far behind the dictatorships and all will have the American homeland in their sights either out of ideological hatred or as a shield to permit their own local wars of conquest. These weapons will be used and when after that post-Hiroshima taboo has been broken – used often.
Pat Buchanan should know better. In fact, he does know better having been in the Nixon Administration when Richard Nixon forced the Soviets to back down on their potential nuclear attack on Red China, a situation China itself recklessly provoked, Pat should realize how possession of nuclear weapons emboldens tyrannies to take risks they might have otherwise avoided. Overwhelmed by an obsession with Israel, Jewish conspiracies and personal slights received from presidential primary campaigns long since forgotten, Pat levels his fire not against radical Islamists who thirst to kill us all nor dictators who crush their people under an iron boot but against the editorial offices of the Weekly Standard.
And he calls this Conservatism ?
