Not mocked enough (at least by those who unfortunately count the most)

Via Glenn Greenwald and his "Unclaimed Territory" site comes a link to an article in The American Conservative. Lest one be surprised much, these are the “old” conservatives tracing their leanings back even to the Robert Taft school of following George Washington’s advice to avoid “entangling alliances.” They were accused of being isolationists in their day, and today they don't much like immigration, at least the kind from Mexico. They don’t like the Iraq War and its architects either. As the excerpt below suggests, it’s a valuable read regardless of source:

They Only Look Dead, Scott McConnell, December 18, 2006

. . . . This election season ends with neoconservatism widely mocked and openly contemptuous of the president who took its counsels. The key policy it has lobbied for since the mid-1990s—the invasion of Iraq—is an almost universally acknowledged disaster. So one can see why the movement’s obituaries are being written. But the group was powerful and influential well before its alliance with George W. Bush. In its wake it leaves behind crises—Iraq first among them—that will not be easy to resolve, and neocons will not be shy about criticizing whatever imperfect solutions are found to the mess they have created. Perhaps most importantly, neoconservatism still commands more salaries—able people who can pursue ideological politics as fulltime work in think tanks and periodicals—than any of its rivals. The millionaires who fund AEI and the New York Sun will not abandon neoconservatism because Iraq didn’t work out. The reports of the movement’s demise are thus very much exaggerated.

The neo-conservatives who got us into this mess – as everyone now calls them, although they profess to hate it – are on the ropes, and, of course, their story now is that the Iraq War was a great idea, but Bush just screwed it up in the implementation. They continue to hold to the notion that the United States should “spread democracy” throughout the world – and by “spread,” they really do seem to mean by force of arms. Indeed, it often seems as if they actually prefer to spread it by force of arms, perhaps to solidify the intimidation aspect of their foreign policy views, although I suspect they would disavow that proposition seeing it in black-and-white. But if necessary, if that’s the only way to get it done, yes, by force of arms.

These are supposedly intellectuals, great thinkers at Johns Hopkins, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute. But all I can think of is this: did these people ever pay any attention to the history of the 20th century? Did they ever even raise a kid? During and after World War I, we had articulated the great principle of “self-determination.” The Arabs demanded and eventually got their own countries. Jews demanded that they have a place to call their own. Not many years later we had India throwing off the yoke of high-minded British imperialists, and then, one after the other, Ghana, and Nigeria and Kenya, and Tanzania, and all of the African countries, removing control by Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal. There was Algeria and Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia. The British and the French gave up the ghost of empire with relief. There were strong independence movements, so far unsuccessful, in Quebec and Puerto Rico. Latin American countries one by one have tried to reduce their dependence on the U.S., and for years Fidel Castro made a living setting up the United States as a foil for organizing the “non-aligned nations.

Why would anyone with a third of a brain and a middle-school knowledge of history think we could, successfully, go in with guns and bombs, kill tens of thousands of resisters who have families and consider themselves to be patriots, kill and destroy the homes of thousands of citizens as unfortunate but necessary collateral damage, and with very few people who either speak the language or have spent significant time in the country, identify the bad guys from the good guys, and set up and prop up a government based on our own idea of what a democracy should look like there? In an era where self-determination continues to hold sway and evolve as a fundamental principle of organizing human society, the whole idea of American dominance in the way the neo-conservatives conceive it is beyond preposterous. Yet Tim Russert, Wolf Blitzer and company continue to book these people and give them a platform on national television? The Russerts and Blitzers need to be subjected to relentless ridicule until they finally drive the neo-conservatives into the wasteland they deserve.