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Goldberg: Lessons From History Are Irrelevant

So, in other words, Osama bin Laden & Co. get to determine the legitimacy of our policies because these terrorists are the truest expression of the will of the people? Isn’t this a bit like saying a farmer can’t clear a field if it might upset a rattlesnake? ~Jonah Goldberg Goldberg continues to confirm every […]

So, in other words, Osama bin Laden & Co. get to determine the legitimacy of our policies because these terrorists are the truest expression of the will of the people? Isn’t this a bit like saying a farmer can’t clear a field if it might upset a rattlesnake? ~Jonah Goldberg

Goldberg continues to confirm every criticism I have made of him, and has managed to distinguish himself here as even less impressive than I had thought.  You do have to be fairly dense to conclude the things quoted above based on what Ron Paul said last night.  Obviously, Paul never said anything of the sort.  He wasn’t talking about legitimacy or illegitimacy of policy (though he could have in certain cases to good effect), but instead was effectively talking about whether a given policy is prudent and wise.  Policies that help to produce violent, suicidal attacks appear to Dr. Paul to be poor policies.  I wonder why.  He said nothing about “the will of the people” here or anywhere else.  Non-interventionists would obviously oppose entanglements overseas regardless of whether terrorism resulted from these entanglements, but how much more reasonable is the non-interventionist view when these entanglements do result in terrorist attacks?  If Goldberg would declare, as he has, that Robert Taft is “irrelevant” to the present moment, he may as well chuck almost the whole of the history of U.S. foreign policy.  Oh, that’s right, he and his confreres have done exactly that, just as non-interventionists have been claiming for some time.     

If the goal of U.S. foreign policy is to secure the national interest and strengthen American national security, it is very simply unwise to make policies that demonstrably contribute to additional, unnecessary threats to our national security.  If interventionist policies and military deployments overseas contribute to “blowback” that directly harms citizens of the United States, it is reasonable to argue that these policies helped to cause these negative unintended consequences and that they are therefore more desirable, different policies that should be pursued.  Those held hostage by terrorist demands are those who inflexibly refuse to adjust policy out of fear of showing weakness.  They offer no solution to the threat, but propose war after deployment after intervention to allegedly combat the problem their preferred policies helped to create and in so doing only magnify and deepen the problem.  Their fear of appearing weak is itself a fundamental flaw that dooms them to keep perpetuating the same errors that helped land us in this predicament.  

Reagan’s decision to withdraw from Beirut was the right one at the time, but obviously the better, earlier decision would have been not to intervene in Lebanon.  The decision to leave Beirut appears now, in distant hindsight, as a contributing factor to emboldening jihadis because the government kept intervening in Muslim countries, deploying armies in the Islamic world and harrassing certain Muslim countries.  Those errors contributed far more to what came later than did the belated decision to leave a place where we should never have been.  Constant meddling combined with relatively quick withdrawals is assuredly a lousy combination, which is why we should stop intervening in the first place.  If Goldberg isn’t interested in Taft, maybe he could try something a bit more recent, such as the Powell Doctrine–at least back when Powell actually believed in his own doctrine. 

We were wrong to be bombing Iraq in the 1990s.  First of all, it was illegal under international law.  More than that, it was pointless and served no American interest.  We were wrong to have tried to strangle Iraq with sanctions.  The Gulf War had little, if anything, to do with American interests.  At most we were fulfilling our obligations to the U.N.  (This is part of the reason why non-interventionist conservatives also have little time for the U.N., since enforcing its mandates has become a frequent excuse for meddling in countries that have nothing to do with us.)  As for policy towards the Soviets, containment and opposition to Soviet power did not necessarily entail wars in Asia, least of all in Vietnam, which even the author of the original “Containment” article opposed as foolish and misguided.  Goldberg would probably respond that George Kennan is also irrelevant.       

To persist in the belief that U.S. policies had nothing to do with 9/11 or, even worse, that they may have had something to do with it but it is absolutely unacceptable to change them anyway is to hold a position in which you effectively declare your indifference to the damage to U.S. national security that these policies inflict.  You have taken the view that there are more important things than securing this country.  I suppose a person could take that position, but he has to be pretty obnoxious to sit in judgement of anyone else’s foreign policy views.   

Of course, war supporters also routinely cite the authority of Al Qaeda higher-ups when they think it bolsters their arguments for remaining in Iraq.  Listen to what Zawahiri said–we can’t leave, we’d be playing right into their hands!  Supporters of the war are only too happy to take Bin Laden or Zawahiri as oracles and to take them far more seriously than anyone else does when it suits them.  To take note of what Al Qaeda members have said before or even immediately after their attacks is, however, off limits, because that way points towards a potential exit from the mess that interventionists have helped create.

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