Buchanan and anti-imperialism [2]

C. G. Estabrook galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu
Tue Nov 23 12:52:42 PST 1999



>From Sam Smith's current Progressive Review, referring to the speech that
I mentioned in an earlier post:

POLITICAL QUIZ

[With how many of the following statements do you agree? For extra points, identify the source of each statement.]

1. We were told we were fighting to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Albanians. Before NATO's air strikes, 90,000 had fled. But after NATO's peace, 180,000 Serbs have been driven from their homes . . . We were told we were fighting to prevent another Auschwitz, that Milosevic's mad killers were butchering tens of thousands, perhaps a hundred thousand people, suggested our Secretary of Defense. A few weeks ago, a Spanish doctor in search of mass graves had found 187 bodies, and the death toll of Albanians was estimated at 2,500 . . . Twenty-five hundred dead is a terrible tragedy; Auschwitz it is not

2. We read of tens of thousands of deaths among Iraqi children. Is it moral to cause their deaths because these toddlers refused to rise up and oust Saddam, which the mighty Army of Desert Storm was itself reluctant to do? America is a good country; she does not make war on children.

3. We need a new foreign policy rooted neither in the Wilsonian Utopianism of the Democrat Party nor the Pax Americana of the Republican think tanks and little magazines, a policy that reflects the goodness and greatness of this Republic, but also an awareness that we were not put on this earth to lord it over other nations.

4. As for our policy of "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq, it is sterile and unsustainable . . . If we can engage China and North Vietnam, and even North Korea, why can we not at least talk to Iran and Iraq? Have we not suffered enough terrorist atrocities -from the massacre of our Marines, to Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-to awaken our elites to the reality that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic act of violence on U.S. soil to finally awaken our gamesmen to the costs of global hegemony?

[All four statements are from a recent speech by Patrick Buchanan.]



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