Honk if you think it's a conservative war

By Steven Greenhut
The Orange County Register

On many days, a hardy band of anti-war protesters stands along a main Brea commercial strip banging plastic paint buckets, wearing attire that tries too hard to evoke images of the 1960s, and carrying signs that implore passersby to honk in support of their no-war-for-oil messages.

Although refusing to honk, I once slowed my Demon SUV, rolled down the window, made the peace sign with my fingers, and said in a pronounced surfer accent, "Peace, duuuudes."

The local protesters seem a good-natured bunch, but their message echoes that of the anti-war protesters who clogged streets throughout the United States and Europe last weekend. As the massive anti-war rallies prove, many demonstrators aren't simply against a war, but in favor of various left-wing causes and bizarre conspiracy theories that involve the president, oil companies and CIA helicopters.

The big-city weekend protests seemed like many other protests of the past decade, with Socialist Workers, "free convicted cop-killer Mumia" activists and other leftists trotting out the same old cliches. Throw in signs that read "selected not elected" and - the favorite of one Register colleague - "Bush is an [sic] moron" and the whole shtick is up to date.

Yet driving through Brea last Sunday, this unreconstructed right-winger found himself more sympathetic to the lefty protesters' anti-war message than to the flag-waving counterprotesters who showed up across the intersection, and who were getting a healthier response from their signs calling on motorists to honk their horns in support of U.S. troops.

Yes, I support our troops. I support them being safe at home with their families, and looking for gainful work in the private sector.

The crossroads at Brea Boulevard and Imperial Highway, where protesters and counterprotesters glared at each other from separate corners, highlight the crossroads of the debate over the Bush administration's evolving plans to take out Saddam Hussein and his mobster-like regime.

The left hates this looming war (although most leftists were silent when Bill Clinton waged an unjust war on Serbia) and the right is gung-ho, calling for boycotts of French products because President Jacques Chirac has the gall - or Gauls? - to disagree with America.

But is it really a left versus right issue, a battle between liberals whose first instinct is to appease and conservatives who are willing to step to the plate and defend America against its enemies?

I don't think so. If anything, this is a war driven by a peculiar band of ideologues, known as neoconservatives, who believe not so much that Saddam Hussein is a Hitlerian threat to America, but that his toppling will spark a "freedom" revolution in a part of the world that has known little more than tyranny. (The original neocons were social Democrats who became Republicans out of their disgust of liberal appeasement of communism.)

In an October 2001 Weekly Standard article forthrightly titled, "The Case for American Empire," the Wall Street Journal's Max Boot made the prototypical neocon foreign-policy argument:

"Over the years, America has earned opprobrium in the Arab world for its realpolitik backing of repressive dictators like Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe. To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim."

Yet that is also a distinctly nonconservative objective. Boot's proposition is more akin to Woodrow Wilson's left-wing ideals of endless international intervention, or FDR's bogus promise to promote the four freedoms (freedom of speech and worship, freedom from want and fear) across the globe, than to the traditionally conservative, or libertarian, views of America's founders. They eschewed entangling alliances and believed that America should be a beacon of freedom but a protector only of its own.

In his 1951 book, "A Foreign Policy for Americans," Mr. Republican himself - Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio - understood what today's pro-war right cannot grasp: "No foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted without reservation or diversion to the protection of the liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and only to preserve that liberty." (The book is available in its entirety online at http://www.nd.edu/{tilde}rjensen2/articles/misc/Foreign_Policy-Taft.pdf.)

Protecting liberty, not reforming the world. War as necessary, not because, under some evidence-deficient theories, some dictator might funnel weapons to some group that could, possibly, under some convoluted circumstances, attack us sometime in the future.

"There are a good many Americans who talk about an American century in which America will dominate the world," Taft continued. "They rightly point out that the United States is so powerful today that we should assume a moral leadership in the world to solve all the troubles of mankind."

But Taft had an answer to those, including the many war hawks today, who advance this Pax Americana argument:

"I quite agree that we need that moral leadership not only abroad but also at home. ... I think we can take leadership in providing of example and advice for the improvement of material standards of living throughout the world. Above all, I think we can take the leadership in proclaiming the doctrines of liberty and justice and in impressing on the world that only through liberty and law and justice, and not through socialism or communism [or, my addition, Islamism], can the world hope to obtain the standards which we have attained in the United States."

This isn't some "nice, but unrealistic" advice. Taft was writing at a far more perilous time than our own. An aggressive communist regime was targeting American cities with nuclear bombs and was building an internationalist movement bent on conquest. He understood the perils of doing too little and the nastiness of this nation's enemies.

Yet he also understood the graver perils of ignoring the wisdom of the founders. He knew that utopian military crusades sap American tax dollars, lead to the grave reductions in freedom at home that always accompany a state of war, and spark unforeseen and often dreadful consequences.

Taft was Mr. Republican, and a bitter foe of the totalitarianism embraced by many modern-day anti-war protesters, but he surely would understand why so many people have taken to the streets in opposition to war. And why I'm halfway tempted to grab a "no war on Iraq" sign and join those bucket-pounding leftists along Imperial Highway.