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Ending A War To Start Another War

Justin Raimondo would like to give Jason Chaffetz the benefit of the doubt: One, it is clear that a great many conservative Republicans are undergoing a transition: faced with the consequences of eight years of dangerous and debilitating militarism, some are beginning to question the basic premises of interventionism, as Chaffetz does with his insistence […]

Justin Raimondo would like to give Jason Chaffetz the benefit of the doubt:

One, it is clear that a great many conservative Republicans are undergoing a transition: faced with the consequences of eight years of dangerous and debilitating militarism, some are beginning to question the basic premises of interventionism, as Chaffetz does with his insistence on limiting the goal of the “war on terrorism” to simply taking out al-Qaeda.

Which brings us to the second reason for cutting Chaffetz a little slack, and that is the political importance of an emerging anti-interventionist caucus in the GOP, especially at the congressional level. The political rationale for Democratic hawkishness is always that the Republicans will supposedly beat up on Obama and the Democrats in Congress if they show “weakness.” With a strong anti-interventionist tendency in the GOP, the Democratic Leadership Council and its “centrist” allies will have to come up with a different excuse.

If there were a “strong anti-interventionist tendency in the GOP” and if Chaffetz represented that tendency, no one would be happier than I. I don’t believe he does represent such a tendency, just as I don’t believe that “isolationist sentiment” is at a record high. It’s exactly because Chaffetz’s position on Afghanistan has nothing to do with any anti-interventionist tendency that I find it so objectionable. Chaffetz makes this clear in his advocacy for war with Iran, which would be far more ruinous to regional security and U.S. interests than even the Iraq war has been. His position on Afghanistan is most likely nothing more than a means to an end, which is to free up additional forces and attention and to redirect them in a war of aggression against Iran.

Much like many of the Pew respondents who want us to mind our own business while supporting military strikes against Iran, Chaffetz claims to want to scale back our entanglements in the region in one area simply to deepen them far more disastrously elsewhere. Far from limiting the definition of the “war on terrorism,” Chaffetz is actively pushing for war against another member of the so-called “axis of evil” and he endorses the idea that Iran represents the greatest threat to U.S. security. Why cut him any slack when he is perpetuating the worst sort of fearmongering about a greatly exaggerated threat from a state we can easily contain? Chaffetz’s Iran position is no different from the thinking that prevailed during “eight years of dangerous and debilitating militarism.” In fact, Chaffetz is staking out a position on Iran that is more aggressive and dangerous than the one the Bush administration ultimately took while in office. He has wrapped this in a superficially attractive package of criticism of Afghanistan policy, which seems to have won him some admirers on the real antiwar right, but I assumed most non-interventionists were wise enough to see through this misdirection.

Raimondo would like to see echoes of the Powell Doctrine in Chaffetz’s argument, but he is not calling for overwhelming force in Afghanistan. Were he to do so, he would have to endorse a complete pull-out from Iraq to begin to provide the necessary forces to meet that requirement of the Powell Doctrine. He does not do this. Instead, he is calling for minimal restrictions on military tactics for the soldiers already deployed there.

During the debates over the Iraq war, most opponents of that war have stressed our support for the war in Afghanistan to make clear that we believe that there are wars that are legitimate and in the national interest. Why should we credit anyone on the right when turns against the one war that most of us have believed to be worth fighting? More to the point, why should we encourage someone who is calling for war with Iran and whose position on Afghanistan is nothing more than a means of facilitating that war?

I agree that successfully opposing policies of empire and perpetual warfare will take a broad-based, diverse coalition. However, I fail to see how an eager proponent of attacking Iran could actually be part of such a coalition, and I don’t see any point in pretending that he is part of a shift in foreign policy thinking on the right when that shift doesn’t seem to be happening. Like many other false starts over the last few years, such as the antiwar right’s fleeting beatification of Chuck Hagel and the grasping at the straw of Sam Brownback’s reservations about the “surge,” encouraging Chaffetz’s opposition on Afghanistan will not weaken the policies we on the antiwar right oppose one bit. Like the stands taken by these other “antiwar” politicians, Chaffetz’s criticism of Afghanistan policy is similarly insignificant as an indicator of change in how Republicans look at foreign policy questions. This is undoubtedly bad news, but there is no point in pretending that things are otherwise.

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