It would be rude to ask the Atlantic or Foreign Policy magazines, or the New York Times‘s David Brooks to stop for a moment to think about those who were right regarding the Iraq War.
Perhaps we could ask them to reflect on why the right people were right.
There have been many reflections from war veterans in Legacy media lately. If Boot shows any signs of learning from his mistakes, readers might be more confident in the meaculpa. He supported American intervention in almost every conflict since the Iraq War. This includes Libya and Syria during the Obama years, as well as Ukraine today.
These supposedly disillusioned Iraq hawks will cease to see the next conflict in exactly the same way they saw 2003. They might be able to admit that Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, Chronicles and The American Conservative were right to oppose Iraq War.
It is time to hold those responsible accountable for the twentieth anniversary of war and David Frum’s “Unpatriotic conservatives” essay in National Review. This means that we must give credit to the anti-interventionist left, whose fundamental importance in the 21st century politics was clearly demonstrated by the fact N.R. created a cover story attacking it at the same time George W. Bush started bombing Baghdad.
Frum and his friends almost knew that the paleoconservatives, paleolibertarians, and underfunded paleolibertarians from 2003 would one day lead to a larger force. The conservative establishment was still a threat by the mere idea of a Buchananite legality. It was therefore the “unpatriotic America First right” that R. targeted at the outbreak war.
Frum’s essay was intended to be the political equivalent to “shock and fear,” the decapitation strategy that the Bush administration used in the initial days of the invasion. The American Conservative had been around for less than one year at the time. Pat Buchanan was relegated from MSNBC where executives forced him to assume the role of loyal Republican, and to support Bush’s invasion. Ron Paul had few allies among his colleagues in the House of Representatives–there were just six anti-war Republicans, most of them moderates. Robert Novak was a respected right-leaning figure, but he didn’t have any institutions.
The other side supported the war and challenged the patriotism expressed by those opposed to it. These included elite neoconservative think tanks and magazines, Republicans who were robotically loyal to Bush, legacy conservative magazines, think tanks and think tank that deferred the Republican president and neoconservative intellectuals. The D.C. and New York elite right had always displayed a cognitive dissonance. It wanted to “own” the libs, as we would now say. But it also wanted to be treated the same way as the liberal elite. The middlebrow institutional right, which was neither populist nor global, worshiped the neoconservatives who “made it” in New York, academia, and the world of Philanthropy.
What was the War Party, which occupied America’s middle-right, worried about? It was clairvoyant enough to see that Donald Trump would rise, sounding very much like Pat Buchanan (on wars and the deep-state) Ron Paul.
The gatekeepers were bothered by three things. Buchanan was a bloody candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 1992. In electoral politics, his popularity had declined by 2000. He could still write a bestseller book.
Second, Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, and others had noticed an intellectual rebellion online–sites such as Antiwar.com, Mises.org, and the personal website Mises founder Lew Rockwell were all attracting young right-wingers in the same way as unpolished right-wing accounts on Twitter. Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo, and other members of these “paleolibertarian”, circles made mockery of Goldberg. This was a direct challenge N.R.’s self-proclaimed role as keeper the right’s respectability.
However, ideology is the third most significant cause of concern for establishment circles. The Iraq War was not a policy that was derived from facts without regard to a pre-existing worldview. All neoconservatives, neocon-allied conservatives, and most of the right’s critics, supported the war. This is because the war was an extension to an already-raging conflict of ideas.
One side was the idea that American liberalism, which neocons often insist is the essence American conservatism, is fundamentally good and true. This means that America is not a country or a people, but an idea. It should not be restricted by borders. Our borders may limit what goods and people can come to America, or those of others, which will limit the reach and impact of American-style liberalism or democracy.
Neoconservatives ascended to leadership of the American right in the 1980s and 1990s in part through successful infighting and institutional warfare–insufficiently neoconservative editors at conservative magazines, for example, were deposed, new magazines and other institutions under the full control of neoconservatives were launched, and these institutions tended to practice coordinated cancel campaigns against anyone on the right who said the wrong thing about immigration, war, or the power of neoconservatives within the movement. The online right experiences what Buchananites did in the 1990s, 2000s, when Amazon, Google, and Facebook coordinate to cancel right-wing expression. While it is not practical to start one’s own Amazon or Google, Buchanan could still create The American Conservative magazine back in 1990.
However, neoconservative hegemony also resulted from ideas. As conservative movement functionaries struggled to choose between being lib-owning outsiders and respectable colleagues to the liberal elite, conservatism as an ideology was also fractured after the Reagan era. A deeply religiously charged grassroots Christianity did not easily blend with free-market beliefs, whose early advocates had celebrated the indifference to sectarian passions. The right-wing foreign policy thought was overwhelmingly focused upon the Cold War and communism. There was no place for a middlebrow conservative in the postwar period to find any sort of guiding principle for foreign affairs. How could he determine what threat America was facing and what vision should guide America’s foreign policy?
These questions were answered by the neoconservatives, which had more articulate answers than mere partisan hackers and single-issue policy advocates. The neoconservatives worked with Catholic intellectuals from the center who had also followed the same left to right path as the Neocons. They developed a theory that reconciles faith and markets. And they supplied a map to navigate foreign policy: Threats were now everywhere, because the aim of American policy should be to extend American principles–universal as they are–across the planet.
Rogue states were not only an obstacle to the immanentization of this eschaton, but also a source of indigestible principle (sorry! It was also a counter-universalism, an indigestible principle that if it wasn’t extinguished would continue to grow. Hence, the obsession with Islamo-Fascism after 9/11. This nonsense term interpreted Al Qaeda, Iran and Iraq–and always Nazi Germany which was somehow never defeated–as the same threat. The enemy of today is still fascism but it is domestic fascism. For a reminder, see the Bulwark’s latest version of neoconservatism.
The other side of civil war on right–the one that opposed the Iraq War, and many other wars since then- -is made up of very different philosophies. David Frum in 2003 called “unpatriotic conservatives” a wide range of thinkers.
Although they are united against wars such as the invasion of Iraq and have similar political philosophies, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan clearly have very different political views. There could be large differences even within a single paleoconservative magazine like Chronicles. For example, Sam Francis might be a non-believer in nationalism and Clyde Wilson would be an anti-nationalist Southern Catholic who supports mostly free-market economics. The paleo-right is also known for its eccentricity and fractiousness at the individual level. The imperative to respectability has led to almost as much expulsion among paleos than the threat of losing honor. Robert Novak was anti-Iraq War, but he had very little to do with his fellow un-patriots. Buchanan, however, was a friend.
The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times can claim credit from the anti-neoconservative left for being right about Iraq War, when nearly everyone else was wrong. There is an easy reason for this. The anti-neocons were correct despite themselves, but only accidentally. It was like a stopped clock. They shouldn’t be treated with the same respect as Max Boot, David Frum, David Brooks, French or French for their self-examinations. Buchananite rights are racist, homophobic, and fascist. But what if they haven’t caused the deaths of millions more innocent Iraqis like the well-meaning center right?
My fellow paleos don’t agree on everything. It would be impossible given their diversity. Liberals, left, right, or center, find them disagreeable. However, in matters of life and mortality, war and peace, any person who feels even the smallest sense of responsibility has to deal with the uncomfortable fact that the disrespectful right may have something to offer the more educated precincts American punditry. Although a stopped clock is only right twice per day, it is still two times more accurate than a clock that has been wrong.
Anti-neocon right is so offensive to liberals because it’s precisely what makes “unpatriotic conservators” more knowledgeable about war than their neoconservative counterparts. Are you up for it?
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It is their rejection for liberalism, even the libertarians on the anti-neocon left do not subscribe the liberalism that unites this country’s respectable elite. This rejection of an idea also means that it is rejected by the class that embodies that idea, which is that same respected elite. Even when they are in Congress, the paleos are considered outsiders and “aginners”. They don’t believe America’s leaders are competent or good enough, nor that the ideas they inspire are realistic or benign. They don’t believe Washington can do the right thing with intelligent and virtuous liberals in charge. This is because the philosophical foundation of the whole edifice has been destroyed. It failed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It didn’t work after World War II. Japan and Germany embraced the American order because of the threat of Soviet dominance. These states are far from the end of history. The liberalism that served a purpose during the Cold War is now a source for dangerous irresponsibility after the Cold War.
Editors of liberal magazines will not change their worldview to learn lessons about the Iraq War or American foreign policy. Even if they are a bit more skeptical the next time around–this time in fact–it will help them better prepare for future foreign policy failures. Even the smallest acknowledgement that men like Pat Buchanan were correct twenty years ago would be a breakthrough in intellectual openness, and seriousness in legacy media. It’s glasnost.
The challenge for the liberal elite will be to learn a discomfiting learning from the deplorable left. However, it is up to the right to overcome its negativity and eclecticism without losing its skeptical wisdom. Because they opposed liberal utopianism, the opponents of the Neocons were correct about the Iraq War. Human beings are influenced by ideas, even silly ones. It takes more than seeing clearly to stop horrors like the Iraq War. You also need others to see your vision. There might be lessons for the right from the neoconservatives or the rest of liberal war party.
