A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Confessions of a thirtysomething right-wing peacenik

Marvin points to a blog post discussing a poll indicating that we thirtysomethings are the only age group still giving majority support to the Iraq war. Much speculation abounds in the comment thread about us children of the 80s having been brainwashed by the evil Reagan.

Coming near the tail end of this cohort (I’m 32), I’ve always been anti-war, beginning with my teenage skepticism of the Gulf War propaganda fed to us by the classroom “news” program Channel One when I was in high school. I did have a slight deviation during the Afghanistan conflict, seeing it at the time as a justifiable response to the 9/11 attacks (I’m a bit more ambivalent about that now).

Perhaps surprisingly, it was really the liberal “humanitarian” wars of Bill Clinton that put me solidly in the anti-war camp. A truly self-defensive war I could theoretically get behind, but the whole idea of dropping bombs on foreigners to make them get along better always struck me as incredibly corrupt and perverse. I think this is actually part of the reason I became something of a right-winger in the late 90s – in those days it was the congressional Republicans who were opposing the President’s wars! This trend of Republican dovishness probably peaked with candidate George W. Bush’s “more humble” foreign policy and skepticism about nation-building.

Obviously times have changed, and the anti-war position is only represented in the current crop of GOP candidates by Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul made the case that non-intervention is the traditional conservative and constitutional position, though it might be a bit of a stretch to call Ike an isolationist of any sort. It’s indicative of how surreal these debates are that Paul, a radical libertarian “fringe” candidate, is the only GOP contender who comes anywhere close to the position of the majority of Americans on the war, even if not us warmongering thirtysomethings.

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6 responses to “Confessions of a thirtysomething right-wing peacenik”

  1. Chip Frontz

    Boy, the quality of discussion on the comments page of that blog post is really great.

    Reply
  2. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Hmm. How are the 50-somethings holding up, as a group? Nicely anti-war?

    As for me, I favored punitive attacks on the Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and official military.

    Not an invasion. Not a conquest. Not an adoption. Not some stupid, Wilsonian hallucination.

    More broadly, I always liked the Libertarian coldness toward military interventionism.

    Lately, I have come to think they are pretty much right about the rest, too.

    Maybe the best argument against much by way of humanitarian, nation-building, foreign-aid type interventionism is the sad truth that there are some problems you just can’t solve.

    Not only not with invasion. Also not with some stupid, vast “Marshal Plan.”

    People forget the Marshal Plan worked because all we had to do was provide a stake for Europeans to put their own houses back in order.

    They already knew how to run a modern, industrial world.

    It’s a different story in the most poverty-ridden parts of Africa, Asia, or Latam.

    At least until the neocon takeover of the GOP, it was the Democrats who always favored both kinds of intervention, military and not, on the theory that if something needs doing then we can do it. Can do. American know-how. Blah, blah.

    If a country needs to be fixed, no matter how broken it is, just give it to America’s liberals. We can do it, they will say. And we morally have to try.

    Right?

    But for years before 9/11, Jonah Goldberg at NRO argued the West in general and the US in particular, perhaps through the UN, ought to take over Africa and save it. The whole continent. Or as much as could be forced to receive out benificence.

    So it isn’t just the liberals who are living in lala land. Either they’re all stupid or they’re all corrupt and blowing smoke for the Military Industrial Complex, that wants steady work.

    Reply
  3. eatingwords

    We’re remarkably alike on this point. Good for you for agreeing with me! 🙂

    Reply
  4. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    PS. How many foreign development projects fronted by Western money are just scams like the currently controversial Alaskan bridges to nowhere?

    Bridges nobody needs are like wars nobody needs. They’re just a boondoggle for contractors and manufacturers in need of customers.

    Reply
  5. Chip Frontz

    Lee, what would you think of, say, U.S. participation in a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur? Is that a dead-end, nation-building imperial presumption, or a more humble use of power that you could get behind? Or something else?

    Reply
  6. Lee

    Chip, I’m ambivalent about that. For one thing, is there even a peace to be kept? The people who’ve been advocating some kind of intervention there seem pretty vague on what would actually be required to secure the region. Are “peacekeepers” just supposed to interpose themselves between civilians and the militias? Is “regime change” on the table? etc. Secondly, is this another case where we end up intervening in some other country’s civil war and picking winners and losers? I’d like to hear a little more about how proponents of this kind of intervention actually see it working.

    I saw an interesting argument made somewhere that if we intervene in places like this we actually encourage various rebel and separatist groups to ramp up the violence in the hopes that Western powers will intervene, resulting in them obtaining a better position vis a vis their government then they would’ve acquired otherwise. It’s a kind of “moral hazzard” argument: if you prevent people from bearing the full cost of their behavior it will create incentives for them to behave irresponsibly.

    Anyway, though I wouldn’t rule out humanitarian intervention in principle, I do think it needs to meet the criteria of any other just war such as prospect of success and the creation of a lasting peace, which would entail attending to the root causes of the conflict. Unless you really get the population behind it you’re going to end up doing it on the cheap and not really solving any problems.

    Reply

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