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TAC Told You So

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As most readers know, my bailiwick at The American Conservative is writing about cultural conservatism, an area I visit far more than foreign policy. Nevertheless, I am grateful to work for a magazine that fights so hard from the Right for realism and restraint.

Earlier this month, when it emerged in Congressional testimony that the Obama administration had spent $500 million to train what amounted to four or five “moderate” Syrian rebels, I thought of Daniel Larison’s blog post from August 12, 2014, warning that Obama had just set aside half a billion dollars to drop down the Mideast rathole. Larison wrote at the time:

One would think that events in Iraq over the last few months would dispel the illusion that U.S. arms and training guarantee that things will develop in a certain way. The U.S. spent years and enormous sums of money to train and equip the Iraqi army, and it was useless in preventing ISIS from seizing large parts of Iraq.

And on June 30, 2014, Larison also wrote to criticize the president’s $500 million plan as a boondoggle in the making:

All of the calls to arm the opposition in Syria are based on the false belief that the U.S. has the ability to manipulate and direct the course of a foreign civil war, and that it is only because Washington has “failed” to insert itself aggressively enough that the war has turned out the way it has. Obama’s decision has the distinction of being guaranteed not to “work” on its own terms while also being harmful. Adding in a few more weapons into the Syrian civil war isn’t going to achieve anything except to help prolong the war and put off the day when a negotiated settlement can be reached. The more support that the U.S. and other outside governments provide to the opposition, the less inclined they will be to negotiate. Arming insurgents doesn’t give the U.S. much in the way of control or influence over them, but it does implicate the U.S. in whatever they do with the weapons and training provided to them.

More Larison:

The developments of the last six months ought to have put an end to the idea of arming the Syrian opposition once and for all, but the administration has outdone itself in finding a Syria policy option that makes no sense, satisfies no one, and slowly pulls the U.S. into a conflict where Americans still have little or nothing at stake.

And now, a year later, the verdict is in: Larison was entirely right. Half a billion taxpayer dollars, thrown to the wind in a bipartisan donnybrook.

TAC told you so! This magazine was founded in foreign policy realism — specifically, to oppose from the right the Bush administration’s foreign-policy adventurism in Iraq. TAC was right in 2002, and it is still right to oppose U.S. meddling in places where we have no business. After the 2016 elections, a new administration will take the reins in Washington, and you can be certain that whether the White House is occupied by a Republican or a Democrat, the War Party will still be in power, devising new ways to spend money spreading mayhem and undermining global stability and America’s national security in the process.

Please consider adding your financial support to The American Conservative‘s mission. There’s no one else like us. We work hard to be David to the foreign policy and defense establishment’s Goliath, motivated by the belief that keeping America strong means avoiding unnecessary foreign entanglements. If you share that view, then we need your help.

I also want to make an appeal from the social and religious conservative corner. Lately I’ve been working on a story about the religious liberty fight. Concluding an interview with one prominent source in the Christian legal community, the source thanked me for the things he’s been reading on this blog about the political and legal complexities of the religious liberty fight — and how the Kim Davis circus is actually hurting the cause. “You may not know this, but so many of us working in this field are reading you every day,” the source said. “You’re saying what we think.”

It’s not the motivational message going out from the Christian-Industrial Complex inside the Beltway, but it happens to be what’s really happening. I’ve tried to bring the same realism to covering religious liberty and social conservatism as my TAC colleagues bring to analyzing foreign policy. My writing in this space about the Benedict Option was seen some time ago as pessimistic and dystopian by many conservatives, but after the Indiana RFRA shocker and the Obergefell decision, the Benedict Option is one of the hottest topics among social and religious conservatives. And it all started here.

If it’s important for you to have TAC as an incubator of creative-minority conservatism over and against the party line, understand that we cannot do what we do without the financial help of you readers. Please make your tax-deductible gift to The American Conservative today.

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