Modern Conservatism, perpetual war

Neil Clark wrote last summer about how the modern Conservative party have been wholly captured by the neo-conservative hawks. I knew about Gove, Hague and Fox, but it turns out that all the key figures in the cabinet have similar views. Neil Clark also touches on how the Cameron campaign was orchestrated by special interests.

So what a Modern Conservative election victory would bring us is more confrontation with Russia, support for sanctions against Iran for what is an entirely legitimate nuclear programme, an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and forays into Somalia (justified by gloopy humanitarianism). And this is a time of austerity, when the middle classes will have to take the hit on welfare benefits and tax rises.

The Eastern Europe watch blog noted how apathetic the poles are about involvement in Afghanistan, a war opposed by the majority there. It also points out the blindingly obvious but politically incorrect observation that there is less muslim immigration in Poland, and therefore less danger of home-grown terrorism. Eight years after 9/11, immigration to Britain continues unabated. The British people are sceptical about the benefits of mass immigration and they are also sceptical about defending Britain by fighting wars on the other side of the world. The ordinary member of the Conservative party to a large extent will reflect the population as a whole.

But Modern Conservatism means you take the power of decision from the rank and file, who are too reactionary and stupid to make the correct decisions and leave them to an enlightened, progressive clique. Who needs democracy? William Hague has said that a conservative goverment would need to turn around public opposition to the Afghanistan war.

It is also noteworthy that the Immigration Advisory Service (IAS) had a presence at the Conservative party conference. At time of writing, there are two postings on the IAS home page. One from Modern Conservative Immigration spokesman, Damien Green, tells the IAS in-crowd that a future government should not follow public opinion. Here Green also talks about Europe-wide solutions. The second posting on the IAS site has an IAS person saying joined up thinking and curbing human rights abuses across the world is the way to fight immigration. Those caring people in the IAS are dispensing a presciption for perpetual interventions and wars across the world in the name of "human rights". Tightening our own border controls and asylum regulations is not the kind of change approved of by Modern Conservatism and its allies. "Joined up thinking": where did we hear that before? Is that Blairism? or Blameronism?

There is a link between immigration and modern utopian wars. The globalist elites, which includes the modern conservative and republican party elites, have given up on controlling their own borders; and in order to make immigration safer, they try to control large tracts of the rest of the world, which are the source for migrant invasions. In order "to make the world safe for globalism democracy".

The fact that Al-Queda and the Taliban hate Shia Islam as much as they hate West should make these War-on-Terror fanatics think that Iran and the West have common cause. The nebulous concept of "global security" means that all local conflicts are seen through the simplistic prism of Free-world vs Islamic extremists; "global security" necessitates that the vaguest of threats demands a military response from an economically bankrupt and war-weary US and UK. As Ron Paul said, sanctions are an act of war. A vote for Cameron is a vote for the McCain-Cheney axis. George W. Bush was a realist compared to these.

Obama and Iran

"Bomb Iran Bomb Bomb Bomb", joked Senator John McCain to the tune of the Beach Boy song, in the early days of the presidential campaign. Luckily for the world he is still Senator John McCain and not President McCain. But imagine how "Bomb Iran" from a presidential candidate sounded to the Iranians.

The Republicans were the best reason to hope for an Obama victory; or at least to view Obama as the lesser of two evils if you couldn't quite stomach the vacuity of the "Change" message, the the Blair-like (Cameron-like) contempt for the electorate that campaigning on something as non-specific as "Change" implies.

Much of what Obama has been doing on the home front has been awful: Bailout II, the stimulus, massive health care reforms, climate change; but generally on foreign policy, Obama has been an improvement. He has at least reduced the numbers of irreconciliable enemies of the free world. Reaching out to Cuba, Venezuala, Russia, especially Russia, that is good. On Iran too, he has been restrained, but is close to a lone voice. Congress voted to condemn the Iranians, with only one representative dissenting, the great Ron Paul. So politically it will be difficult.

Obama has been brave to resist calls to get heavy with Iran, but even in the first response, there was some ambiguity. Talk of "universal values" of democracy is close to neo-con/liberal interventionist talk, to the Iranians it would have still sounded like meddling, and the fear is that the realist foreign policy of "world citizen" Obama would collapse if regimes like Iran don't pass the values test. Sure enough, when the pressure gets tough, his rhetoric gets tough too. The neo-cons want the creedal nation to fight a messianic war for western democracy, and they can base their call to arms on the assumptions of the dominant liberal ideology.

As for an improvement in Iran if Moussavi wins, well look how empty the colour revolutions of Ukraine and Georgia ended up being. So don't hold your breath. Embracing western-led reforms led to terrible deprivation and disorder for Russia and Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile the American economy is heading for a lot more trouble according to Peter Schiff. It will take economic collapse to tame American, and western, hubris.

Where the right is still going wrong

Read on article on The National Interest website against the strategic idiocy of preventative war and the obsession with biffing on the head every bad guy who pops up and says "boo".

The present reliance on warfare to defend the free world is counter-productive, but it is eroding civil liberties and sucking out its economic lifeblood. Not that the US has much of an economy left.

To neo-conservatives jacobins and those swayed by them, torture is OK, many right-of-centre people go along with it. They vote for corporate republicans and fake conservatives.

The Republicans deserve to lose in 2012 if they continue to be dominated by the war-party. If they don't change, what is the point of the Rebublicans? They don't defend conservatism or liberty; the Obama administration is as interventionist as Bush. So Americans may as well vote Democrat if they want to bomb civilians and trash the freedoms they inherited as their birthright.

neo-conservative dreams at conservative home?

There is a piece by Andrew Mitchell at Conservative home about how we must intervene in Somalia - in order to stop the scourge of pirates on the high-seas. The keywords are "intervention", "free world", "renegade", "state failure", "state building", "export terrorism", "humanitarian crisis". So it looks like they have another war or foreign adventure in the pipeline.

Like so much from the Conservative party these days, the article seems to be coded, packed with euphemism, so that the position of the writer/speaker is difficult to pinpoint, the intention being presumably to mean different things to different people, and to provide as narrow a target as possible to opponents in relation to the amount of information given about the writer's real views.

As for "over-fishing and toxic dumping have contributed to the economic collapse" being the reason for the pirates's activities, this may be true to an extent; but some of us with use of a memory, when looking for why there is a breakdown in political order (and there won't be much economic activity in a war zone), might just blame the Bush administration's help to Ethiopia in overthrowing the what look like now relatively moderate Islamic courts; all in the name of the War on Terror of course, fighting rogue states renegades.

The key paragraph is:

"The piracy we are seeing is a direct consequence of prolonged state failure and instability in Somalia, which has the potential to destabilise the whole region and export terrorism and disease to our own shores – as well as deepening the already appalling humanitarian crisis."

It looks like the usual tactic: lots of bad things will happen unless we get involved, and getting involved is the best, if not only, way to stop bad things happening; and if that sounds too self-interested let's also talk "humanitarianism" so as to create a moral duty to intervene. Interesting that one of the comments mentioned "bleeding-heart liberal" - this person no doubt heard a liberal interventionist talking; I heard a neo-conservative using liberal rhetoric as an afterthought. This is the dog-whistle rhetoric people talk about, except with people reactign negatively.

I suppose you could say the damage is done: Somalia is in a state of near-anarchy - so what better place for western intervention? The only thing is, I don't know of a western intervention that has created a stable political or social structure since the War on Terror began. The comments are pretty skeptical too.

There are more jaundiced views about intervention from the US-based anti-war.com site, where the pro-interventionists are recorded as speaking somewhat more directly. Military intervention is being mooted seriously. US foreign policy website, The National Interest advises caution, partly for economic reasons. Cameron's new-found fiscal conservatism, if nothing else, might also favour non-intervention, I would like to think.

Ron Paul suggests allowing merchant vessels to arm themselves. Sensible, proportionate, and the taxpayer doesn't pay (for once). But Andrew Mitchell won't get his heroic intervention.

If it's on Conservative home, does that mean it is favoured by the Conservative top brass? Cameron is a neo-conservative, we hear; Michael Gove is a self-confessed neo-con; the fact that the Cheney-McCain-following Liam Fox is Defence Secretary probably signals that Cameron is as interventionist as Blair and Bush. Mitchell is shadow international development secretary, so he must be speaking with authority.