Oh, it makes my head hurt

Freud supposedly once said, "Sometime a cigar is just a cigar". His own smoking habit undoubtedly contributed to the mouth cancer that eventually killed him. Well, technically, he committed assisted suicide with help from his doctor, which was legal in England, where he died. But before I get too far off track, the point I wanted to make is, "Sometimes an isolationist really is an isolationist."

I know 1939-41 was quite a while ago. And I know, as I've mentioned in more than one blog post, that when politicians warn against "isolationism", they are usually conjuring up a phony bogeyman as a foil against which to promote their own wise, far-sighted, Churchillian policies.

But for the love of Athena, people, Ron Paul really is an Old Right isolationist. And when he tosses in a phrase like "America first", as he did in this week's Republican debate, it's really not too much of a stretch to recognize that he's evoking the anti-Semitic, pro-German America First movement of 1939-41. It has been easy enough to recognize what Pat Buchanan's invocation of the phrase means. And one key thing to understand about this far-right brand of "isolationism" is that "isolation" is not exactly a good description of their position. Hyper-nationalist, nativist, or xenophobic would probably be better labels.

What's prompting this is Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog post of 11/29/07, McCain blames Rise of Hitler on Ron Paul: Not Invading and Occupying other Countries Branded 'Isolationism'. Yes, the great Maverick McCain's position on the Iraq War is ridiculous. And I hope both current politics and later history remember that The Surge was advocated by the great Maverick, and he made a point of taking credit for it in this week's debate.

Look, if nativists like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul make some decent point about the Iraq War, that's great. As long as I'm mentioning Churchill, I may as well recall his statement about welcoming an alliance with Soviet Russia in 1941 after Germany invaded them in Operation Barbarossa. He said that if Hitler had just invaded Hell, he would find a few nice words to say about the Devil in Parliament.

But while I might cheer for an individual point from Paul or Buchanan, I'm not going to wish "more power to them". Because the good points come packaged in thoroughly reactionary, nativist packages. And it's a mistake not to recognize that and take full account of it. What's more significant about the debate between Paul and the "mainstream" Republican candidates is that the Party of Lincoln no longer has liberal or moderate factions to speak of. The debate now is between rightwing militarists and even more hard-right, nativist hyper-nationalists, Paul being in the latter camp.

And the points I've heard Paul make against the Iraq War in those public debates are, well, pretty weak. I'll repeat that: he makes poor antiwar arguments.

I heard him in an earlier debate say that he opposed the Iraq War in part because it was being fought to enforce UN resolutions, an "antiwar" argument that resonates with with Stormfront and John Birch Society rightwingers who think the UN is part of the World Jewish Conspiracy. But that argument reinforces the administration's own phony arguments in favor of the war. This is the kind of double-reverse argument that makes your head feel like it's being stuffed with cotton when you think about far-right arguments for a while.

Juan Cole at least noticed that Paul couldn't seem to remember that it's mainly Kurds in northern Iraq, not a minor point in the context. He quotes from the transcript of Paul in last night debate:

The best commitment we can make to the Iraqi people is to give them their country back. That's the most important thing that we can do.

(Applause)

Already, part of their country has been taken back. In the south, they claim the surge has worked, but the surge really hasn't worked. There's less violence, but al-Sadr has essentially won in the south.

The British are leaving. The brigade of Al Sadr now is in charge, so they are getting their country back. They're in charge up north -- the Shia -- the people in the north are in charge, as well, and there's no violence up there or nearly as much.

So, let the people have their country back again. Just think of the cleaning up of the mess after we left Vietnam. Vietnam now is a friend of ours -- we trade with them, the president comes here.

What we achieved in peace was unachievable in 20 years of the French and the Americans being in Vietnam.

So it's time for us to take care of America first. (my emphasis)

One of the biggest problems for Democrats in fighting for Constitutional government right now is that many of them still can't grasp how far the Republican Party has gone toward turning itself into an authoritarian Party, and how much they are injecting radical-right perspectives into their "mainstream". If citizens of a more democratic persuasion can't learn to recognize how a phrase like "America first" carries a special meaning for the nativist right, just as "Dred Scott decision" has a double-reverse weirdo meaning for white Christian fundamentalists (relating to abortion), we're going to have a hard time recognizing what's happening to the Republican Party.

Otherwise, Paul's argument is no great help to the antiwar movement at this point. For example, when he says, "Already, part of their country has been taken back. ... There's less violence, but al-Sadr has essentially won in the south", this is the kind of phrasing that Republicans can too easily spin into, "the hippies are supporting the enemy." And remember, Ron Paul is a Republican. For a lot of rank-and-file Reps, Paul's antiwar arguments are some of the few that they will actually hear direct for the critics mouths.

As Cole himself has pointed out repeatedly, it's not the case that Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (JAM) has "won in the south". The key port of Basra, for instance, is apparently mostly controlled at this point by a split-off from JAM. And in other cities, we've seen small clashes between JAM and rival Shi'a militias even in the relatively quieter recent months. William Lind, a conservative whose work appears in isloationist places like this one for Antiwar.com, argues in In the Fox’s Lair 11/29/07 that the stand-down of Al Sadr's JAM could be part of strategic coordination with Iran that could turn violent if the administration increases pressure against Iran. (Note: this is a different point than the idea of Iran's alleged sponsorship of attacks on Americans up to now.) Lind also argues that major offensives often follow periods of quiet in situations like this. Paul is way premature in declaring that peace has arrived in the Shi'a south.

And what the hell is Paul talking about that "the people in the north are in charge, as well, and there's no violence up there or nearly as much"? Hasn't he heard about Turkey's cross-border strikes, and the threat of an actual Turkish invasion? Or the ethnic cleansing battles around Kirkuk, a key oil-rich area that's very much in contention between Kurds and Arabs?

The reality-based points that needed to be made, if he were really interested in building opposition to the Iraq War within the Republican Party, included challenging the misleading and exaggerated claims about the alleged success of The Surge, aka, the McCain Escalation. And some kind of assessment of what it means for the future civil conflicts in Iraq (and I don't mean just long-term future) that the United States is financing and at least unofficially sponsoring local Sunni Arab "tribal leaders" (aka, warlords) that will operate independently of the Shi'a government in Baghdad. Can you say, "build-up for the civil war?" Ron Paul apparently couldn't manage to last night.


Instead, what did he toss out? Another double-reverse argument, in which he accepted the basic premise of the war defenders, that peace is breaking out in Iraq. And not in the polemical sense that Tankwoman did yesterday in saying, hey, if we're having such spectacular success, the administration should declare "Mission Accomplished" and withdraw the troops. Instead, what Paul tossed out was basically Old Right isolationist boiler-plate. His Iraq-specific comments, if anything, reinforced the basic assumptions of the prowar line of the day. Gee, a Republican Congressman reinforcing Republican talking points while positioning himself as a possible third-party candidate for the general election? Gosh, what could he be thinking?

Superficial happy talk like Paul's ditsy throwaway line, "Just think of the cleaning up of the mess after we left Vietnam," doesn't help the antiwar cause much. What happened in Algeria, what happened in Vietnam, is what happened in other "post-colonial" type situations. Civil strife intensified for a while after foreign troops left. Cambodia was an even worse example of post-colonial nastiness.

Iraq will almost certainly have a nasty civil war after American troops are withdrawn. But the real point is to recognize that American power is very limited in that situation. It's likely that the longer the Americans stay, the worse the post-exit hostilities are likely to be because the Americans' presence is providing a focus for organizing militia groups. And we're even funding Sunni militias that will probably sooner rather than later be fighting the militias (official and otherwise) of our allied Shi'a government. We can certainly see that the of the three steps of disaster we could have expected in Iraq, two of them - anti-American resistance and and tangled civil war, have already occurred. Turkey's stand-off with the Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq is a reminder of how close we could be to the third, all-out intervention by Iraq's neighbors.

There are no good options for exiting Iraq. But the options only get worse the longer the US delays establishing a schedule for exiting the country and making a full handover to whatever government and private factions are there to hand power to. The antiwar cause doesn't need people like Ron Paul pimping a phony fell-good version of how everything will settle down and we'll have some libertarian-isolationist paradise of free trade. The Iraq War is a strategic disaster with huge repercussions that will go on for decades. Political leaders need to address them in a reality-based way, including the kind of diplomatic arrangements that would be necessary to get American troops and equipment out safely and to at least head off an all-out regional war over Iraq. Paul is not doing that very well, so far as I've heard.

Also, he's a flaming rightwinger! Most serious critics of the Iraq War are not. Even the conservative ones like Scott Ritter or Andrew Bacevich.

Tags: authoritarianism, iraq war, juan cole, republican party, ron paul