Richard Spencer

August 12, 2009

Many Americans like to think that foreign policy and war, on the one hand, and domestic policy, on the other, are distinct, unconnected political realms. The antiwar hippies who chanted, ?Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?? didn?t suffer much cognitive dissonance condemning LBJ?s war and endorsing his Great Society. Indeed, liberals might change their whole opinion of Robert McNamara if they only stopped focusing on his war-making and directed their gaze instead towards his socialist governing philosophy and post-Vietnam work at the World Bank. Murray Rothbard attempted to bring the New Left full circle in the ?60s and capitalize on its anti-state animus with respect to the war. His efforts were fruitless (as Justin documents in his biography of Rothbard.) There actually were a handful of libertarians hiding out in the New Left at the time; however, Rothbard?s mistake was to think that your average hippie or Ramparts contributor really meant it when he occasionally used ?libertarian? sounding-rhetoric in the specific context of criticizing the war. (It?s almost as if someone from the Campaign for Liberty heard a Republican question the constitutionality of Obama?s Cash for Clunkers program and then concluded that he must also grasp the fundamental illegitimacy of the Iraq invasion. (No, he doesn?t.)

Simply put, both the American Left and Right prefer it when the twain, foreign and domestic policies, never shall meet. 

But in reality the twain are intertwined. Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and George W. Bush were all progressive utopian in both spheres, and each of their world wars was accompanied by a progressive global agenda abroad (the League of Nations, the United Nations and Bretton Woods, the ?Freedom Agenda?) as well as a massive expansion of the state at home. The connection even holds in the area of tactical policy, as Tom Woods relates in his ?politically incorrect? history of the United States: 

The Great Society, argues historian Walter MacDougall, had its foreign policy analogue in the Vietnam War. In the attempt to protect South Vietnam?s anti-Communist government from overthrow by a Communist insurgency tied to the North, the U.S. government sought to defeat the enemy not in the battlefield, but by establishing good liberal government in the South that would win the undisputed allegiance of the South Vietnamese.

President Kenedy?s advisers were split as to what kind of changes they thought needed to be made in South Vietnam first. One group, whom historian Patrick Lloyd Hatcher has called the ?Whigs,? emphasized the importance of encouraging popular government in countries like South Vietnam. ?Tories,? on the other hand, emphasized the importance of economic progress, and ?were prepared to tolerate authoritarian regimes so long as they were effective.? MacDougall describes how this divide among Kennedy?s advisers applied to Vietnam:

?In the case of Vietnam, Whigs asked such questions as how many independent newspapers and radio stations there were, did religious minorities enjoy freedom and worship, how fair and frequent were elections, could citizens get justice in the courts, how humane were the police? But Tories thought it premature to expect a new state beset by a ruthless insurgency to pas an American civics test. They asked such questions as how many villages had sewage and clean drinking water, what was the ratio of doctors to citizens, how many telephone and motorbikes were there, how much fertilizer was needed, what was the rice yield and per capita income?? 

The Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), assigned the task of gathering all this information, thus became ?less like a comrade-in-arms to the Saigon regimes than a nagging social worker.?

?War as social work? came to mind recently as I was reading a USA Today report on the strategic thinking of Washington?s Numero Uno in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal:   

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan says many Taliban insurgents, particularly in the violence-plagued south, could be persuaded to stop fighting if they could find jobs in a stabilized country.

[?] Gen. Stanley McChrystal said his No. 1 unmet need is to have functioning local governments in Afghanistan and officials who can provide basic services. 

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan says many Taliban insurgents, particularly in the violence-plagued south, could be persuaded to stop fighting if they could find jobs in a stabilized country.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said his No. 1 unmet need is to have functioning local governments in Afghanistan and officials who can provide basic services.

The patriots at Commentary are cautiously optimistic, but McChrystal’s ?strategy? seems like the foreign-policy equivalent of the stimulus package: ?peace through government jobs.? An enlarged Afghan public sector will allow Washington to succeed where Alexander failed. General Petraeus?s ?Sons of Iraq? program, in which he paid insurgents to act like Boy Scouts, seems ruthless and shrewd in comparison. How long before the generals announce that Total Victory will come through a ?Clunker Camels for Cash? program?