As far as I can recall, I didn’t denounce the American invasion in Iraq when it started in March 2003 or any time soon after. I came to realize that this was a foolish venture. Although I did not explicitly state this view at the beginning, it was widely believed that I was one of the most vocal and outspoken critics of the invasion.
David Frum was also riled by me in a screed published National Review March 25, 2003. He claimed that I opposed a war he passionately supported, but his invective against my were unrelated to my opposition to the invasion in Iraq. My adversary called me “the most stubbornly solipsistic among the paleos” because I had reacted against the success of his neoconservative pals to prevent me from getting a graduate professorship. Frum also said, somewhat parenthetically that I was accused by Frum of being late for class and lecturing in such a way that a disgruntled student mistakenly thought it was rambling. Curiously, Frum offered no evidence that I was an “unpatriotic conservative” for openly opposing the neoconservative-planned invasion of Iraq. Frum assumed my position based on my relationship with other people whom he attacked in his screed.
Frum took my support for the position of American Conservative founders implicitly because I was on the board at the time this magazine was founded in 2002. Other publications such as Chronicles were less enthusiastic about W’s military adventures.
My critics were correct about the position I had been tending. While I did not go out and protest the war, I realized it was a disastrous blunder that was based on the dubious claim of the Iraqi government having “weapons to mass destruction.” The invasion caused many deaths in Iraq, but it did provide some benefits for the most strident instigators. David Frum and other Neoconservatives made their careers as political advisors or pundits on the basis that they defended a war that shouldn’t have been fought. Michael Gerson and other propagandists also made a career as journalists advocating an American mission to spread democratic values. We have continued to work towards that goal, as can be seen in our efforts to bring LGBT rights into Hungary and other traditionally Christian countries.
It took me several weeks to realize these facts, which many of my friends had already grasped. Although I was initially excited about the American forces’ landing in Iraq, it soon became clear that they were American. However, it soon became apparent that we had fallen into a trap from which we wouldn’t be able to escape until 2011. Furthermore, the neoconservatives were pushing this conflict from at least 1991’s end and were making wild claims about Saddam Hussein’s plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction. They also defended it with their usual vain human rights rhetoric.
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A large anti-war presence on the right was one of the most obvious things about the invasion and its subsequent response. Throughout the Cold War I assumed that the right was the side that supported military force against America’s enemies. I believed that those opposed to our military efforts were always on the left. Yes, there were exceptions to this generalization. I was aware of Murray Rothbard among libertarians and George Kennan among traditionalists. These opponents of a confrontationally anticommunist foreign policy were, to me, the rare exceptions.
Through my connections at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, I was able to meet more leftist opponents of the “warfare/welfare state” in the 1990s. It was then that I realized that not all Americans opposed to Vietnam’s involvement were Communist sympathizers. My battles with the Neoconservatives in 1980s revealed that not all Cold Warriors were on the right. Even after the fall of the Soviet empire, there had been anticommunists on the left who influenced American foreign policy. It should have been clear that the non-Communist left would win the Cold War.
However, it was my reaction to the invasion of Iraq that made me realize in a way not obvious before that the right could be antiwar for right wing reasons. The war crisis gave me the key cognitive takeaway: one could not oppose American military force as a bleeding-heart liberal, but because its use was unjustified strategically and morally and was an invitation for greater power appropriation by the deep state. This conclusion was reached when I thought about the invasion of Iraq and the stormy response to it. Contrary to what some of my neoconservative critics claim, this was not my first response in March 2003.
