Pat Buchanan For President?

[THOTH]

June 30, 2004

Three Steps to Sanity

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

 

June 28, the day in 2004 that the Americans transferred sovereignty to Iraqis and proconsul Paul Bremer hastily departed Baghdad, is a day freighted with historic significance.

 

On June 28, 1914, 90 years before, Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and led, five weeks later, to World War I.

 

On June 28, 1919, German representatives, their country under an Allied starvation blockade, prostrate before a threat by Marshal Foch to march on Berlin, signed the Versailles treaty that ended World War I, and set the stage for Hitler and World War II. Seen as an Allied triumph in 1919, Versailles proved a disaster.

 

Thus, it is a good time to attempt to draw up an interim profit-and-loss statement of what President Bush has accomplished in what he calls the "War on Terror." Who is winning this war?

 

To answer that question, we must first ask and answer antecedent questions. What is the war about? What are we fighting for? Who, exactly, is the enemy in this war? What is he fighting for?

 

Since 9-11, the president's objectives have been to exact retribution for the massacre, overthrow the Taliban enablers of Osama, run al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, remove Saddam, disarm Iraq and defend America. He has attained them all. Yet, 54 percent of Americans believe invading Iraq was a mistake. The nation understands that something has gone wrong.

 

The nation is right. For what this war is really about is who shall rule in the Islamic world. Will it be the men who share our views and values? Or will it be True Believers who will purge that world of what they see as our odious and corrupt presence?

 

What our enemies seek in the great Sunni Triangle from Rabat to Chechnya to Mindanao is what the Iranian Revolution achieved: to be rid of the Americans and of rulers that they view as vile puppets of the United States, to purify their societies and to unite their world against the West.

 

If this is indeed the ultimate goal of the radical Islamists, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a strategic victory for the enemy.

 

Consider what has happened as a result of our war on Iraq. An enemy of Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam, has been removed. His secular Ba'ath Party is gone. A vacuum has opened up in Iraq that the Islamists and their allies may one day fill. The Arab world has been radicalized and supports the Iraqi resistance in its drive to defeat and expel the Americans.

 

The destabilization of the Saudi monarchy through terror has begun. Rulers in Arab countries have been forced to distance themselves from the Americans if they wish to retain the support of their people. Western tourists are staying away from the Middle East, Western investment is on hold, and Western workers have begun to depart Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

 

"There exists today a hatred of Americans never equaled in the region," Egyptian President Mubarak told Le Monde. "In the beginning, some people thought the Americans were helping them. There was no hatred toward Americans. After what happened in Iraq, there is an unprecedented hatred and the Americans know it."

 

This longtime friend added, "American and Israeli interests are not safe, not only in our region but in other parts of the world, in Europe, in America, anywhere in the world."

 

The war on Iraq into which his neoconservative advisers prodded the president seems to have ignited the very "war of civilizations" between Islam and America that the president said he wanted to avoid.

 

Raised to believe in the innate goodness of America and the nobility of her purposes, President Bush finds it hard to believe the best recruiting tool al-Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents have is the presence on Iraqi soil of the U.S. soldiers he sent to "liberate" Iraq.

 

Of late, the president appears to have begun to understand that our presence is a primary cause of the war of resistance and that, when this phase ends, the real war, the civil war to decide which Iraqis rule in Iraq, begins. Will it be Iraqis who wish to belong to the modern world? Or Iraqis who wish to be part of the anti-American Islamic revolution?

 

War, Clausewitz reminded us, is but the extension of politics by other means. All wars, even wars in which terror is the weapon of choice of the enemy, are about, as Lenin said: "Who? Whom?" Who shall rule whom? And even in an Arab world where monarchs and autocrats now rule, the victors will be those who win the hearts and minds of Arab peoples.

 

This is the war we are losing. And to win this struggle, the United States needs to do three things that may go against the political interests of both parties: Stand up for justice for the Palestinians. Remove our imperial presence. Cease to intervene in their internal affairs.

 

We Americans once stood for all that. And if we go only where we are invited, we would be invited more often to come and help.

 

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC

[THOTH]

August 23, 2004

Neocons Seek Vindication in Escalation

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

"The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." This is the heart of the Bush Doctrine from the president's "axis of evil" address to Congress. And the nations that constituted that axis were Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

 

 

Under this doctrine, Iraq was invaded, Saddam overthrown and his army disbanded, though we have yet to find any of the "world's most destructive weapons."

 

 

With North Korea, the train has left the station. Pyongyang can now produce nuclear weapons and may possess half a dozen. For nations like North Korea and men like Kim Jong Il do not build costly and complex ballistic missiles simply to throw conventional explosives across an ocean.

 

 

Which leaves Iran. With Moscow's assistance, Tehran has been constructing a nuclear power plant at Bushehr. Once operational, Bushehr will, like Yongbyon in North Korea, yield plutonium as a byproduct.

 

 

Last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency also stumbled on a secret uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Its centrifuges were found to contain traces of weapons-grade uranium. Highly enriched uranium, U-235, is a component of atomic bombs. Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, had a uranium core. Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki, had a plutonium core.

 

 

Lately, an effort by Russia, France and Germany to have Iran open up its nuclear plants to inspection has been rebuffed by Tehran. Having seen how America dealt summarily with Iraq, but proceeds gingerly with North Korea, Tehran has likely concluded that when a superpower is threatening preemptive strikes and preventive war, only nuclear weapons can deter it. Those who do not have such deterrents get the Saddam and Taliban treatment.

 

 

So it appears that the decisive test of the Bush Doctrine will come in Iran. And that test is probably not far off.

 

 

The Israelis have reportedly practiced strikes on Iran by crossing Turkish airspace and have special forces in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. There are rumors Sharon has told the White House that if we do not effect the nuclear castration of Iran, Israel will do the surgery herself, because she cannot live under the cloud of an atomic bomb in the possession of the patrons of Hezbollah.

 

 

Enter the "cakewalk" neoconservatives. Though disastrously wrong about Iraq's receptivity to U.S.-imposed democracy, and though they face disgrace and oblivion if Bush loses, they have one last card to play: That is to have America widen her wars with Afghanistan and Iraq with a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. For the neoconservatives, Iraq was simply Phase II of "World War IV" for imperial domination of the Middle East and serial destruction of the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as of Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

 

 

The neocons have not abandoned this imperial project. Nor has Bush removed a single one from power, though they may yet cost him his presidency. And the neoconservative commentariat is again beating the drums for war – this time on Iran.

 

 

This is their hole card. If they can ignite a new war, the country may forget how they bungled the old war. In escalation lies vindication.

 

 

And, in truth, Iran is a matter the president and Pentagon must address. Can we live with an Iranian atom bomb, which will restrict U.S. freedom of action in the Gulf and likely lead to proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Arab world? Or is Iran the place where the Bush Doctrine must be applied, even if it ultimately requires U.S. air and missile strikes on Iran's nuclear sites?

 

 

Given the overstretch of U.S. forces, the invasion and occupation of a nation three times as large and populous as Iraq is off the table. And what would be the probable result of America launching air strikes and starting yet another fire in the middle of the world's gasoline station?

 

 

Tehran would likely retaliate by sending fighters into Iraq, stirring up Shia guerrillas in the south, aiding anti-American warlords in Afghanistan, sponsoring terror attacks on U.S. citizens and inciting Hezbollah to refire the Lebanon front.

 

 

We could find ourselves in a third war with no allies save Israel. Another consequence could be the disruption of oil shipments from Iran, Iraq and the Gulf, a run-up in prices to $60 or $70 a barrel, and recessions in Japan, Europe and the United States.

 

 

Presently, America and her European allies appear to be moving toward Security Council sanctions if Iran does not render hard assurances it is not going nuclear. But if the mullahs have concluded their only defense against U.S. or Israeli preemptive strikes is a deterrent of their own – a not unreasonable assumption given what happened next door – we are headed for a showdown that will change our world forever.

 

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[THOTH]

June 21, 2004

The Wrong War

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

There exists "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

 

There were contacts between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but "they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." In 1994, Baghdad rebuffed approaches from bin Laden to establish terrorist training camps inside Iraq. So the 9-11 commission has concluded.

 

And so, with no weapons of mass destruction yet found after 18 months of searching, the second pillar of the president's case for war falls to earth. Iraq was an unnecessary war.

 

Yet, now we have 138,000 soldiers there, with casualties mounting, the cost rising and the hostility to America's presence growing. Every attack on U.S. troops or contractors, even when they involve Iraqi dead and wounded, seems to be cause for jubilation.

 

Yet, George Tenet of the CIA excepted, the men who told President Bush the war was necessary, that it would be a "cakewalk," that the Iraqis would welcome us with candy and flowers and take to democracy like kids to ice cream are still in place, still in power.

 

In his now-famous 2002 State of the Union, President Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil." He vowed that America would not allow any one of the three to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

 

In 2003, we attacked and invaded the only one of the three that did not have a secret nuclear program. And since that State of the Union, the other two have accelerated their programs to acquire the atomic weapons President Bush said they would not be permitted to have. At this point, the Bush Doctrine has to be judged a limited success.

 

Given the mess in Iraq, neither the American people nor the White House appears to have the desire or will to force an end to the Iranian or North Korean bomb programs. The Iranians, who are threatening to crash the Nuclear Club, are bristling with defiance. Tehran seems to have concluded that America has no stomach for another war.

 

Tehran may be right. But if North Korea already has an atomic bomb and Iran will not be stopped from acquiring one, what does a new world of 10 nuclear nations, six of them in Asia, mean for U.S. foreign policy? We had best begin to consider the possibility.

 

No nation that has acquired nuclear weapons has ever been invaded – for a reason. The strategic base camp for any Normandy, Inchon or Desert Storm invasion could be turned into an inferno in minutes by atomic weapons.

 

This suggests that in confronting a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, U.S. Army and Marine bases in South Korea and Kuwait, and U.S. naval bases on Okinawa and on the south shore of the Persian Gulf are becoming strategic hostages and not strategic assets.

 

Put bluntly, if Pyongyang and Tehran acquire atomic weapons, there are no more axis-of-evil nations with which we can risk war. For there is nothing to be gained from such a war to justify running the risk of nuclear retaliation on U.S. bases in Asia or the Middle East, or on Israel, an almost certain target in any war with Iran.

 

During the Cold War, both sides accepted outrages that might have been casus belli before atomic weapons. The United States did not use on Chinese armies in Korea overrunning our troops the weapons Truman unhesitatingly used on Japanese cities. For Stalin, too, now had the bomb. Nor did we intervene to halt the massacre of Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, or the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Carter's response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a wheat embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics.

 

Moscow, too, was inhibited from taking action in Berlin, where it was strong, when the United States used tactical and theater superiority to force the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. And Moscow also failed to respond to Reagan's seizure of Grenada and aid to the Afghan resistance.

 

As they used to say in the West, "God may have created all men, but it was Sam Colt who made them equal." Nuclear weapons are the great equalizers. They concentrate the mind of a statesman wonderfully. And with North Korea and Iran plodding along toward the building of these awful weapons – in blatant defiance of the Bush Doctrine – the president and Sen. Kerry should be thinking about the world that will exist in the next presidential term. For by the end of that term, Iran and North Korea could both be full-fledged members of our nuclear fraternity.

 

If they are, the idea of an American empire will become as outdated as the British Raj.

 

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[THOTH]

February 4, 2004

What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood?

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Napoleon III, Emperor of France, saw his opportunity.

 

With the United States sundered and convulsed in civil war, he would seize Mexico, impose a Catholic monarchy and block further expansion of the American republic.

 

In 1863, a French army marched into Mexico City. In 1864, Maximilian, the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, was crowned Emperor of Mexico. The French empire had returned to North America a century after its expulsion in 1763.

 

Secretary of State Seward did nothing until the Union armies had defeated the Confederacy. Then, he called in Gen. John Schofield, who had wanted to lead an army of volunteers into Mexico to drive the French out, and instructed him instead to go to Paris. "I want you to get your legs under Napoleon's mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico," Seward told Schofield. To impress upon Napoleon that the Union was in earnest, President Johnson, at the urging of Grant and Sherman, sent Gen. Sheridan with 40,000 troops to the Rio Grande.

 

Napoleon got the message. The French army headed for the boats, and Maximilian went before a Mexican firing squad.

 

Lesson: Nations are unwise to seize upon the temporary weakness of a great power to put military forces inside its sphere of influence.

 

Which brings us to this headline in last week's Washington Post: "U.S. May Set Up Bases in Former Soviet Republics."

 

The lead graph reads like something out of the London Times in the salad days of Kipling and Queen Victoria: "Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased U.S. influence in the region does not pose a threat to them." With bases already in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, we apparently intend to build a base in Georgia, birthplace of Stalin.

 

Query: What are we doing there? What is the strategic interest in Georgia? Tbilisi is about as far away as one can get. Why are we rubbing Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat by putting U.S. imperial troops into nations that only yesterday were a part of that country? Powell anticipated the question: "Are we pointing a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course not. What we're doing is working together against terrorism."

 

But after Iraq, where we invaded an oil-rich country on what the world believes were false pretenses and forged evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, why should Russians not suspect our motives?

 

After all, the neoconservatives who beat the drums loudest for war, and cherry-picked the intelligence sent to Bush that got us into war, have been braying for years that we intend to create an American empire and impose our "benevolent global hegemony" on all mankind.

 

Why should Russians, Chinese and Iranians not believe America's crusader castles in Central Asia and the Caucasus are not part of a grand scheme for a Pax Americana?

 

Have we forgotten our history? When Reagan put Marines into the middle of Lebanon's civil war, 241 perished in the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks. Reagan retaliated, but got out. He should never have gone in. Who runs Beirut or rules Lebanon is not our business.

 

When we intervened in Somalia's civil war, we got "Blackhawk Down" in Mogadishu and 18 dead Rangers. Again, we pulled out. We should never have gone in. When we planted a U.S. army on Saudi soil after the Gulf War, we got 9-11. Now we have pulled out of there.

 

How often must we be taught the lesson?

 

Have we considered the consequences of planting military bases in countries afflicted by Islamic fundamentalism and ruled by autocrats who, only 15 years ago, were apparatchiks of Moscow?

 

A U.S. imperial presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus resented by Russia, Iran and China and detested by Islamists is less likely to contain terrorism than to invite it.

 

Even a cursory reading of U.S. history shows us to be an almost paranoid people about any foreign military presence near our frontiers. The French, British, Spanish and Russians were all bought off or driven out. Moscow's presence in Cuba and meddling in Grenada and Nicaragua in the Cold War were constant causes of American outrage.

 

But if we are entitled to our own Monroe Doctrine – i.e., no foreign colonies or bases in our backyard – are not other great nations like China and Russia equally entitled? Why should they not feel as we do, and one day act as we did with Napoleon, and tell us to get out of Central Asia and to get out of the Caucasus?

 

But, again, why are we going in? Other than empire, what is the vital interest here?

 

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Arpa]

August 23, 2004 

Neocons Seek Vindication in Escalation

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

 

 

The Israelis have reportedly practiced strikes on Iran by crossing Turkish airspace and have special forces in the Kurdish regions of Iraq. There are rumors Sharon has told the White House that if we do not effect the nuclear castration of Iran, Israel will do the surgery herself, because she cannot live under the cloud of an atomic bomb in the possession of the patrons of Hezbollah.

If this whole neo-con stuff is to save Sharon's ass and his asshole of an artificial country then let THEM do it.

 

See below what happened in 1981;

http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1967to1991_iraq_1981.php

[Arpa]

You mean to say that idiot Buchanan has finally realized that "Judeo" and "Christian" are not only not synonyms but in fact antonyms.

This leaves one other idiot at large by the name of Pat Robertson.

One has to suspect the intelligence of all who use the term Judeo-Christian. An oxymoron of all times.

[Arpa]

February 4, 2004 

What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood?

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Napoleon III, Emperor of France, saw his opportunity.

 

Lesson: Nations are unwise to seize upon the temporary weakness of a great power to put military forces inside its sphere of influence.

 

Which brings us to this headline in last week's Washington Post: "U.S. May Set Up Bases in Former Soviet Republics."

 

The lead graph reads like something out of the London Times in the salad days of Kipling and Queen Victoria: "Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased U.S. influence in the region does not pose a threat to them." With bases already in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, we apparently intend to build a base in Georgia, birthplace of Stalin.

This from Groong. You may read it in full there;

 

The USA might help Azerbaijan gain back its Armenian-occupied lands in

return for stationing its troops in Nagornyy Artsax, Azerbaijani

daily Yeni Musavat has said. This could provide excellent chances to

Washington, which aims to reduce Russia's role in the region and is

about to launch its plans vis-a-vis Iran, since Nagornyy Artsax

borders both on Iran and on Armenia which hosts Russian military

bases, the report said. I do not believe that US troops will come here

only to protect the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the deputy chairman of

the opposition Musavat Party told Yeni Musavat. The US forces to be

deployed in the country will be "multipurpose", the party official

[gamavor]

American Foreign policy resembles exactly the situation of a prostitute who was not paid for her services.

 

Even Pat Buchanan doesn’t make sense. The regime of Saddam Hussein was far from being proponent of Islamic fundamentalism; rather something closer to what Colonel Kadafi was (he went through some evolution recently) in Libya – mixture of hard core Marxism with some economic freedoms for a circle of “chosen” and all of these “tastefully” garnished with some Islamic fundamentalism.

 

Actually the most dreadful opponents of Saddam were exactly Islamic Shiite fundamentalists and Sunny fanatics and both groups at one point or another were ‘friends’ of US of A.

 

None of the Middle Eastern countries has democratic regime. The fact that some Saudi princes were loyal to their contracts with American petrol companies doesn’t make them ‘democratic’. The blind (or not so blind) attitude of the State Department leads to inevitable taking of sides in the Middle East, which from a Western perspective should be wrong a priory.

 

The only explanation I have is that the State Department serves shortsighted private interests.

 

American foreign policy is bancrupt. America's moral leadership is in the dust and it will stay there for long time. If you are mighty but behave as a coward all that can happen is the fate of a coward.

[THOTH]

Even Pat Buchanan doesn’t make sense. The regime of Saddam Hussein was far from being proponent of Islamic fundamentalism; rather something closer to what Colonel Kadafi was (he went through some evolution recently) in Libya – mixture of hard core Marxism with some economic freedoms for a circle of “chosen” and all of these “tastefully” garnished with some Islamic fundamentalism.

that was opponent

[skhara]

Altough it is morally bankrupt, it's not that shortsighted gamavor. Ever heard of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)?

 

Check out their website:

http://www.newamericancentury.org

 

interesting how all the interest points are surrounding russia. But russia isn't completely stupid as some like to think. They know what's going on.

 

Either way, I think Pat does make sense. I think he made sense 4 yrs ago.

[THOTH]

Either way, I think Pat does make sense. I think he made sense 4 yrs ago.

well yes & no - though mostly no...

 

Problem is that Pat is (more then a little) bit of a rascist and is a quite a xenphobe. He wants America to close its borders to immigrants, pull out of global obligations (economic in addition to military etc) and to basically cease being a player in the international arena. While many of you here might say hurrah to that...its just not a realistic approach. The world is increasingly integrated & connected - and it pretty much isn't going back - and while there are many issues to this certainly - its basically to peoples benefit. So while I can agree with much of his critiscims (Marx was a good crtic too...) in these articles I can't forget - ultimatly - where he is comming from (and that fundementally Pat is a kook)...

 

Oh yeah - and he hates Jews....for what its worth - so yeah I imagine some of you do like Pat....

[THOTH]

BTW skhara - nice link - thanks. Yeah look who these guys are - you shouldn't be surprised.

 

Its funny in calling for increased defense spending (always self serving - I mean imagine the stock holdings and corporate board positions these guys hold...) - well what they are missing IMO - is how the level of US defense speding disadvantages us as compared to Europe & elsewhere - economically and with the civilian quality of life - ultimatly for the people and the economy it is a burden and one that puts us at competative disadvantage - shame that they fail to acknowledge this...and fail to acknpowledge the comming economic cometition where the US is at risk at being left behind....

[gamavor]

Yeap! Selfishness and self-serving interests will further bring down American influence in near future. Lets hope that it won't lead to any further marginalisation of international relations.

[skhara]

He wants America to close its borders to immigrants, pull out of global obligations (economic in addition to military etc) and to basically cease being a player in the international arena.

 

So basically he is a nationalist who thinks about American interests first. On the other hand you have Bush and Kerry who promote illegal imigration.

 

The world is increasingly integrated & connected - and it pretty much isn't going back - and while there are many issues to this certainly - its basically to peoples benefit.

 

Integrated and connected under American hegemony? If there is one thing that history teaches, is that empires fall. They always do. He doesn't want US to be obligated to anything or to have the US crash by biting more than she can chew.

 

So while I can agree with much of his critiscims ............. Oh yeah - and he hates Jews....for what its worth - so yeah I imagine some of you do like Pat....

 

So do you disagree with his critisism of Israeli policy and the 5 billion USD that is handed to Israel every year?

 

Switzerland is how nations should be. They don't bother anyone, and no one bothers them. A small, mountanous, land-locked nation (does it sound like another country we know ) has the highest per capita GDP compared to all other nations.

 

how the level of US defense speding disadvantages us as compared to Europe & elsewhere - economically and with the civilian quality of life

 

See, exactly. In France pregnant women don't have to worry about working until the very last minute. Europe has enough to effectively defend itself. France and England has nukes. Basically, US spending isn't for "defense", it is for imperialism and agression.

[Nakharar]

Excellent post Shkara!

[gamavor]

I agree too except for this:

 

So basically he is a nationalist who thinks about American interests first. On the other hand you have Bush and Kerry who promote illegal imigration.

 

Immigration to America is like the blood to the body. In the American context being nationalist would mean promote and encourage immigration.