Barrack, Brooks, and the Bushes
I was rather surprised by David Brooks’s column this morning, which included a scatter shot of the kinds of crude, hallow neoconish phrases one would expect from the likes of Kevin James: “intractable enemies” who could never be “pacified with diplomacy”; “If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.” Much of it had the quality of hastily assembled lines offered in response to the editor’s request [Insert appeasement reference here]. I thought Brooks was supposed to be an actual neocon, not one of their talk-radio dupes who let the Frums and Podhoretzes do their thinking while they happily mouth “Islamofascism.”
This aside, Brooks actually did some reporting, speaking directly with the potential appeaser himself, and it’s here that his column actually gets interesting.
‘This is not an argument between Democrats and Republicans,’ [Obama] concluded. ‘It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.’
In the early 1990s, the Democrats and the first Bush administration had a series of arguments—about humanitarian interventions, whether to get involved in the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In his heart, Obama talks like the Democrats of that era, viewing foreign policy from the ground up. But in his head, he aligns himself with the realist dealmaking of the first Bush. Apparently, he’s part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker.
I’d first note that the idea that Obama might resemble Bush the elder and James Baker sounds pretty good to me right now. But there’s more to it than this. For Brooks’s linking of Obama with Baker and the architect of the New Deal reveals that what’s he’s actually saying is much more complicated and ambivalent than it might first appear.
After Obama became the frontrunner, the neocons have assured us that they fear his dangerous political messiahnism, his hope to save the world and chat about world peace with Hugo and Mahmoud, and have struck a pose of being level-headed, prudent realists. Such gamesmanship obscures the fact that the neocons made noise on the right in the early ‘90s with their contemptuous words for George H. W. Bush and Baker, whom the they opposed precisely because the pair resisted America’s world-transforming mission and focused on stability and international consensus. Bush and Baker were the ones Frum and Pearle attacked for propping up the collapsing Soviet Union and failing to rush in and democratically transform post-Saddam Iraq in ’91. Bush and Baker were two of the central villains in Michael Ledeen’s narrative of “freedom betrayed,” when America “walked away” from her duty to fight for a “global democratic revolution.” (All of this was, in many ways, a replay of the neocons’ antipathy towards Henry Kissinger in the ’70s over his détente policy with the Soviets and opening towards China (again the “appeasement of dictators” meme.)) It’s safe to say that Brooks has internalized this literature.
It’s also important to remember that Harry Hopkins, FDR’s chief advisor for the Works Progress Administration as well as foreign policies like Lend-Lease, is in Brooks’s mind far from some terrible precussor to Hillary but, to the contrary,is the kind of state-builder of a “modern democracy” whose legacy Brooks wants to preserve. (See his essay for the collection Why I turned Right, p. 80.)
Read closely with all this in mind, it becomes clear that the passage quoted above has just about the opposite meaning of the one most will take away at first read. Obama might be like Hopkins not because he’s a weak-kneed liberal but because he speaks the language of America’s democratic mission (which Brooks unequivocally endorses). Obama might be like James Baker not because he’s a cynical dealmaker but because he might not be up for enough foreign adventures in the near future. The prospect that Obama might side with an older version of the GOP over the interventionism of Albright, Clinton, and The New Republic is, for Brooks, deeply vexing.
Comments
So Bush, Cheney, and the Republican party are New Deal Democrats except the socialism is reserved for corporations and the military? The collectivist heirs of FDR and Woodrow Wilson.
It’s odd that I call my neo-con co-workers Democrats and they get all huffy. I say odd because we are not part of the military or corporate socialism world which I would think would make them Democrats as in the Democrat party.
But they claim moral superiority and are in right with God so they think they are conservative Republicans.
It’s sooo confusing
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Right, Brooks is a shill. But for all the destructive folly of his son, it is Bush pêre who is politically responsible for the Middle East conditions that would give that son’s folly such scope.
Recall that Saddam Hussein was such a devoted US ally that he went to war with Iran when it had the US hostages; that is, at a time when virtually no one in the world but Saddam Hussein cared to please Jimmy Carter. Reagan and Rumsfeld then deepened the friendship still more.
And so Bush pêre, diplomat extraordinaire, lacked the means to let staunch Saddam know that a Kuwaiti invasion would be frowned upon? It is a question that has never been explained, and hardly explored, and is the original miscalculation whence all the rest followed. The folly of the son only grew from the foundation established by his father.
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Questions that need to be asked
Obama declared: “If they want a debate about protecting the United States of America, that’s a debate I’m ready to win…”
How would Barack Hussein Obama respond, as President of the United States, if American interests in Kenya – such as our embassy – were to become the target of a terrorist attack?
This is not an unrealistic scenario. We all remember the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998 when over 200 civilians where killed and more than 4000 injured in Nairobi. Terrorist could, hypothetically speaking, test President B. Hussein Obama’s promise of protecting the American people (as in “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”) and his resolve to fight global terrorism simply by staging bloody attacks in Kenya. Kenya shares borders with Islamist states such as Sudan and Somalia. Barack Hussein Obama belongs ethnically to the Luo Peoples who live, not only in Kenya, but also in southern Sudan. Would Obama be decisive in his response to a terror attack against American interests in Kenya? Or would he tread cautiously simply because he is part Kenyan? Would Hussein Obama be capable of protecting Americans and American interests in East Africa? Would Obama be afraid of loosing the support of the African-American voter if he was faced with the task of fighting terrorism in Kenya? Would that make him a weak President? On FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists we find Al-Qaeda member Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah. A terrorist listed as responsible of the embassy bombings. He is believed to be hiding in the Puntaland region of Somalia. Just across the boarder from Barack Hussein Obama’s Fatherland. With Obama in the White House would Kenya become a haven for terrorist? Isn’t Barack Hussein Obama – if seen from a terrorist perspective – the perfect candidate for President of the United States?
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If not perfect, then in many ways superior. Harry Hopkins was Stalin’s agent in the White House as revealed by Venona decodings. He got to remodel military intelligence allowing major infiltration by agents loyal to Russia. This was done under General Faymonville, who had his power from Hopkins. Even today, eradication of those networks in our military intelligence is not necessarily complete, which could affect performance in Iraq and Aghanistan, insofar as Russia would like to be a spoiler.
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Also, this needs to be remembered if one knows the espionage story on Hopkins, that Brooks uses thats name, not to vilify, but to praise, a leftist. One could look at Brooks’s statements rather differently now; as on the hypothesis that his loyalty is to Russia, but not to America.
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