Sham Conservatism and the War in Mess-o-Potamia

In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush uttered these notorious words:

"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Is this the kind of thing that passes for "conservatism" nowadays?

Before I continue, I must stress that this article is intended to focus only on Bush's foreign policy – mainly the war in Iraq – and NOT his domestic policy. That topic is for another discussion.

Make no mistake about it. Bush may call himself a conservative, but there is nothing "conservative" about what we're doing in Iraq.

Ever since the beginning of the War on Terror, Bush has employed grandiose rhetoric to justify American actions overseas. Some people dismiss this kind of talk as a cynical ploy. I do not. I believe that our Commander-in-Chief is as serious as a heart attack when he defends this loony agenda.

Unfortunately for the POTUS, this agenda is neither rooted in history nor wisdom. One of the things Bush likes to say is that "freedom is God's gift to every man and woman." If this is true, then God must have had this gift on layaway. Freedom, as we know it, is a modern concept unique to Western civilization. The story of humankind has largely been one of oppression and injustice. A real conservative understands these facts as well as the limits of human beings and governments.

As numerous commentators have noted, things didn't always used to be this way. When he ran for President in 2000, Bush talked about the need for a "humble foreign policy" – as opposed to the "paternalistic idealism" of the Clinton-Gore years. Then 9/11 happened and "everything changed."

Most mainstream "conservatives," such as Rush Limbaugh, his brother David, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Reagan and Oliver North, have jumped on this crusading bandwagon. Only a small fringe of writers and politicians from the "paleo-conservative" and libertarian Right have called Bush out on this madness.

Bush's foreign policy resembles liberal idealism more than it does conservative realism – except that it makes the former school of thought look prudent. The Iraq War is Wilsonianism on acid and steroids.

To be fair, Dubya wasn't the first president to talk in such "visionary" terms. Ronald Reagan often did the same thing, although he carried out his designs with a bit more prudence. At least the Gipper was smart enough to know that if you are going to invade a country, make sure it has an area of no more than three square miles.

Many young conservatives – blissful in the muscular, hormone-driven nature of their ideology – would freak out if they discovered that their ancestors were "isolationists" and borderline pacifists.

Up until the early years of the Cold War, conservative politicians and writers, such as Robert Taft, Garet Garrett, Arthur Vandenberg, George Bender, Howard Buffet (yes, THAT Buffet!), William Borah and Rose Wilder Lane, were arguing that the U.S. should stay out of the affairs of other nations. Even as late as the 1990s, many GOP lawmakers appeared to take a noninterventionist stance when they criticized President Bill Clinton for his actions in the Balkans.

Indeed, the insurgent candidacy of Ron Paul has brought the skeletons of antiwar conservatism into the public eye – which explains why modern "conservatives" are so eager to ignore or attack him.

Even if the president and his right-hand man don't believe in their own megalomaniacal rhetoric, the neocons and their allies in the Religious Right – not to mention their millions of supporters – surely do.

Indeed, it was the neocons who first came up with the brilliant idea of invading a country vastly different from ours in culture and history and making it a spitting image of America. Back in the 1990s, neocons such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote that America should dominate the world via the role of a "benevolent global hegemony." Other neocons wrote about "transforming" the Middle East into some bastion of democracy through violence and war – hence Secretary of State Rice's use of the phrase "birth pangs" to describe the outbreak of destruction in the region during the summer of 2006.

This is not conservatism; this is radicalism. For the neocons, "George and Dick's Excellent Adventure" in Iraq is nothing more than a grand and cruel experiment with Arabs and American soldiers as the unfortunate guinea pigs.

Bush and his henchmen have often compared the situation in Iraq to the American Revolution, but the theories that led to this war owe more to the legacy of the French Revolution, which, along with the Enlightenment, heralded the rise of modern liberalism.

One of the core tenets of this doctrine is the idea of "radical social reconstruction" – the doing away with long-standing cultural traditions and institutions and replacing them with brand-new ones. This idea appalled the legendary conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, who wrote a long-winded denunciation of it, titled, "Reflections on the Revolution" in France.

Bush and the neocons can talk all they want about "respecting and preserving" Iraqi culture and traditions, but radical social reconstruction of the Middle East is what they are really after.

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