Antiwar 'Conservatism'

Reihan Salam has an interesting piece at the left-wing Daily Beast, "The New Anti-War Right."

It's a political analysis of congressional support for the administration's troop surge. Salam notes that while President Obama is under fire from the Democrats' radical base, real foreign policy trouble is likely to emerge from a drop in GOP support for the mission in Afghanistan. Here's a key passage:

Throughout the long presidential campaign, Barack Obama called for winding down the American presence in Iraq to focus on the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, so there is no sense the president is pulling a foreign policy bait-and-switch. But among Democrats, and particularly left-of-center Democrats, there is a pervasive sense that the Obama administration has proved too cautious and centrist on domestic issues. That means there is less willingness to give the president the benefit of the doubt on waging an expensive counterinsurgency, particularly as many of the left’s domestic priorities could well be sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.

And so the president is caught in an extremely awkward position. Abandoned by the Democrats, he is relying on the support of a shrinking centrist foreign-policy establishment that, to put it bluntly, has zero political muscle. The conservatives who back the troop surge don’t think the president is going far enough, and most expect that his effort to craft a compromise counterinsurgency will fail. Among grassroots conservatives, there is a growing sense that the U.S. military is too hamstrung by concern about civilian casualties and political correctness to wage an effective military campaign under Obama, which implies that there is little point in offering him political support.

I noticed Salam's article the other day, and had some thoughts about it then, but let them go -- and looking it over now, I disagree with his charaterization of the foreign policy debte on the war. More important is this developing notion of antiwar commentators who claim to be "conservative" (but who end up giving aid and comfort to our enemies); and Daniel Larison was the first to come to mind.

So, no surprise, he's got a totally predicable essay on this now. See, "This 'New Anti-War Right' is Pro-War and Wrong." Checking the entry, we see the classic Larison mindless oppose-war-at-all-costs defeatism. He takes issue with Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican, who is calling for a troop redeployment. Chaffetz, saying "go big, or go home," decries a war fought amid the consraints of political correctness. He writes, "our presence in Afghanistan does nothing more than endanger our troops, compromise our readiness, and waste our money."

Larison revolts, nonetheless. As he writes at the post:

Critics of the Afghanistan plan such as Chaffetz want to make Afghanistan into a shooting gallery and call it peace. In this way, they can still pretend that they take national security and strategy questions seriously, when they are just reverting to a default position of advocating less restraint, more force and greater indifference to the moral and strategic consequences of our actions. As Chaffetz’s later remarks on Iran make clear, this is not someone interested in reducing the strain on our military or reducing unnecessary risks to American soldiers, as he actively calls for military action that will greatly strain and endanger all of our forces in the Gulf and central Asia. Neither does he give any hint of thinking strategically about how distastrous an Iranian war would be for U.S. and allied interests.

There's more at the post, disgusting as that may be. What's interesting, reading Larison, is that there's little difference between his natterings (despite his claims to "conservatism") and those of the extremist hardliners on the radical left, folks like Code Pink, who have long provided material support to militants on the ground in America's ongoing deployments -- terrorists who are killing U.S. troops:

Larison sits right along with radicals like Justin Raimondo, who likes to spend time with the America-destroying communists World Can't Wait, International ANSWER, and Cindy Sheehan. Indeed, Larison publishes at Raimondo's hate-filled anti-American portal, Antiwar.com.

And that's the thing, hatred of America's forward role in the world ties radical ideologues together, whether they claim to reside on the left or right. The outcome is the same: An American defeat overseas and greater danger to Americans at home.

The fundamental question, always, is what are our interests in Afghanistan? As I've noted many times here, and as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has argued, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

And THAT is the conservative position. All the rest, from Larison over to Jodie Evans, Cynthia McKinney, Brian Becker, and E.D. Kain, is a program for leftist revolution. And it should be resisted.

Well, actually, there are some genuine conservatives calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and they're folks like Representative Chaffetz who're sick and tired of the dithering administration, and who rightly know that President Obama cares only about his own reelection, not American national security or the fate of our fighting forces. These are folks like Pamela Geller and Ralph Peters, both who have argued to bring the troops home, absent a real military strategy of fighting to kill.

And that, of course, is exactly what so-called antiwar conservatives -- like their buddies on the radical left -- just can't stomach.

Image Credit: Ace of Spades HQ and Don Surber.