Buchanan

Pat Buchanan, amazingly enough, has been one of the few conservatives to keep his head about him in the post 9/11 era. Rather than embrace the doctrine of preemption, which he refers to as "attacking people that have never attacked us," he maintains a foreign policy based on Realism rather than Idealism. He has a incendiary column out, continuing his full throated attack against the radical conservatives that control our government. In part, it is an answer to those neoconservatives who have asked why we should wait to engage Hezbollah, Syria and Iran directly, given that they are "our" enemies.

"Why wait?" Well, one reason is that the United States has not been attacked. A second is a small thing called the Constitution. Where does George W. Bush get the authority to launch a war on Iran? When did Congress declare war or authorize a war on Iran?

Answer: It never did. But these neoconservatives care no more about the Constitution than they cared about the truth when they lied into war in Iraq.

As I read that, an unvoiced, Keanu-like "Whoa" went through my head. "Ouch."

Another passage I particularly liked was this allusion to the type of war we're fighting:

No, Israel is doing this, with the blessing and without a peep of protest from President Bush. And we wonder why they hate us.

I love it when people acknowledge the reality that this "War on Terrorism", if it is a coherent idea at all, must be viewed as a war of ideas moreso than a war of military might and tactical prowess, since it is the creation of new terrorists that should concern us as much as the killing of existing ones. It is the strategic victory that signals the end of all wars, and we've lost sight of that through our emphasis on tactical victories - the visceral thrill many of the neocons obviously derive from the thought of "killing the bad guys." A host of strategies and tactics are invoked by acknowledgement that we are not in "total war" as we were with the Japanese and Germans. Soft power, in this war, is the most valuable weapon, lest we amplify the terrorists political message with the deaths of innocents.

The column goes on to thoroughly excoriate the neoconservatives, to the point of accusing them of having other motives than America's best interests at heart. To get an idea of how angry he is at the travesty of government we currently endure, you can see him here, courtesy of Crooks and Liars, talking about the Bush Administration and the neoconservatives. It's a great clip.