Shahid’s Strawman No. 8

Sunday’s Projo ran a detailed, 10-point essay accusing “the right wing” (abbreviated in the article as RW) of hypocrisy. My initial impression is that not a single one of the ten points has any serious merit to it. I’ll start with point #8.

In Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, the Clinton administration called our troop involvement morally imperative. RW leaders opposed all three involvements as devoid of "vital national interest." Now we have the embarrassing spectacle of months passing with our troops able to locate every gold bar in Iraq but no weapons that were supposedly bursting from every closet. Now the moral justification is enough.

First, notable “RW Leaders” did support intervention in Yugoslavia. William Kristol (aka the leader of the neoconservative cabal) supported intervention as vital to the national interest. John McCain and Chuck Hagel introduced a bill into Congress allowing the President wide latitude to use ground troops is Kosovo. Jesse Helms, then chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee (and you can’t get any more RW than Jesse Helms without falling into Pat Buchanan territory) thought that the United States had enough of a national interest in Yugoslavia to sponsor legislation authorizing 100 million dollars in US aid aimed at removing Slobodan Milosevic from power and establishing a democratic regime in his place.

Second, no RWer that I know of has advanced a purely “moral” justification, i.e. a justification devoid of national interest, for intervention in Iraq. President Bush has placed Iraq into a larger strategic framework: topple the most odious regime in a part of the world where democracy is seriously lacking, and it might help to liberalize the entire region. A more liberal Middle East is less likely to serve as an incubator of trans-national instability. Because you do not agree with the strategy does not mean that it does not exist. President Clinton had a hard time gaining support for his interventions because they were not part of any analogous strategic framework.

One down, nine to go…