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Peace Through Cliches

Fresh off of organizing the signing of the unimaginative, meaningless Mount Vernon statement, Ed Meese has a national security manifesto (via Philip Klein) that he wants candidates, elected officials and “others who share these principles” to sign. At first glance, there is practically nothing on this list that anyone in the GOP would find objectionable, […]

Fresh off of organizing the signing of the unimaginative, meaningless Mount Vernon statement, Ed Meese has a national security manifesto (via Philip Klein) that he wants candidates, elected officials and “others who share these principles” to sign. At first glance, there is practically nothing on this list that anyone in the GOP would find objectionable, so this manifesto would appear to be almost as redundant and useless as the Mount Vernon statement, but the assumptions that seem to be behind several of the points make it simply ridiculous. One would be hard-pressed to find any candidate from either major party who would disagree with the importance of military readiness, an effective nuclear deterrent, preserving U.S. sovereignty, and a “foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries.” Even if energy independence is more of a slogan than a realistic policy goal, the references to border security and “energy security” would be widely accepted by people across the spectrum. The potentially most controversial item is the opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is not really a national security matter and doesn’t belong on a national security manifesto.

Who wouldn’t agree that America should be a “nation free of Shariah”? Apparently the manifesto’s authors think this is a disputed point, as if there were a large contingent of “pro-Shariah” candidates running for office. Considering that one of the co-authors is Frank Gaffney, a grade-A loon who seems to hallucinate Islamic crescents in every symbol he sees, we can understand why this bold, courageous “anti-Shariah” position was included.

Likewise, the call for a “foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries” is one that no one would seriously oppose, but what makes this point seem crazy is the assumption behind it that there are people in the government and the country who support the opposite. Affirming support for allies and opposition to enemies is so obvious that it is meaningless as a policy statement. It is the foreign policy equivalent of saying that one is opposed to crime and in favor of law and order, or that one supports education and opposes ignorance. The authors say that it should be “clearly preferable to be a friend of the United States,” and again no one is going to disagree, but they would have to be delusional if they thought that it was not clearly preferable to be a friend of the United States right now.

The one item that will stir some controversy, though perhaps not inside the Republican Party, is the opposition to civilian trials for those classified as enemy combatants and the implicit support for their indefinite detention at Guantanamo or elsewhere. Unfortunately, this means that the distinctive features of this manifesto are its alarmism over supposedly encroaching shari’a and its commitment to indefinitely imprisoning detainees in continued legal limbo. There is also the random call at the end to provide for “accurate portrayals of American history, including the necessity of defending freedom,” which is either an ideologically-loaded demand for triumphalist historical narratives or an utterly unremarkable request for historical accuracy.

What is most remarkable about this manifesto is that it addresses almost none of the major international and national security issues of the day, and aside from the two items I just mentioned there is nothing in the manifesto that could not have been written thirty years ago. I suppose that is to be expected since it is a self-conscious revival of Reagan-era themes, but it makes the manifesto that much more irrelevant. There is no mention of issues of proliferation one way or the other, no reference to arms reduction, and not a word about the two wars our forces are currently fighting. The administration may have renamed the “war on terror,” but as far as this manifesto is concerned it scarcely exists at all.

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