Buchanan: Day of Reckoning - CH 3, The Gospel of George Bush

There are some interesting thoughts and history recaps, but otherwise this chapter is full of problems. Building on the second chapter, Pat is in full-on mode in painting GWB as the pope of democracy. And too often Pat takes a quote from Bush and brings it to a conclusion that magically leaves key words and phrases present in Bush's statements. One example is when he quotes Bush saying, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

From that Pat concludes, "[Woodrow] Wilson was going to make the world safe for democracy [in World War I]. Bush was going far beyond Wilson--to make the whole world democratic." I'm sorry, but I fail to see the word "impose" (or any of its synonyms) in President Bush's quote. Further, I have never heard Bush imply that every democracy must be a carbon copy of our own.

One must keep in mind that Pat Buchanan is an exceptionally strict isolationist. I have problems with this way of thinking, at least from the 20th century on. Certainly isolationism was good advice in our country's first century. The French expected help from us during their revolution and we turned them down, partly because we had just fought the War of Independence and needed to invest in our own future, but also because Washington and the Founders quickly saw the French Revolution for what it really was.

We rightly stayed out of other wars and battles that very little involved for our best interest. However, war has evolved greatly in the last hundred years. World War I is the first place where I scratch my head at our isolationist policy. On the one hand we refused official involvement, yet got dragged in anyway when the Germans sank merchant ships bearing arms and supplies to the Allies. Did Wilson really believe Germany would just let us get away with helping their enemy? Then it was revealed the Kaiser supported a Mexican takeover of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and a Japanese involvement to keep us busy (sound familiar?).

In this modern age of comm and military tech, isolationism for its own sake is very nearly obsolete; not to mention that so many world economies are interlaced that I doubt just about any civilisation can go to war without affecting the national interest of at least one major world power. Plus, the act of burying one's head in the sand at the moment a weaker people is in trouble is not very Christian. Does this mean we must prepare to act militarily in every conflict that arises in the world? Of course not. We must build up allies so that they can be in the best position to defend themselves and others when the need arises.

According to Pat Buchanan, U.S. interventionism in the Middle East during the last thirty years, specifically The Gulf War(?!) paved the way to 9/11. This conclusion--also embraced heartily by ignorant liberal minds throughout the country and in Washington--by a man I have always considered to be a great conservative was immensely disappointing. He appears to justify the jihadist ideology with statements like, "If we wish to remove the conditions that caused 9/11, we must remove our forces from the Middle East. For as long as we are seen as imperial occupiers and overlords over there, they will come over here to kill us." Pat constantly charges that President Bush cherry-picks history, and yet is guilty of it himself throughout the chapter. I find this more grievous for him given that he prides himself on a great knowledge of history.

What I mean is that somewhere Pat Buchanan has decided to ignore the history and culture of the Muslim since Biblical days--and specifically their actions in Europe from the eighth to eleventh centuries. What Pat is failing to understand, or more likely ignoring for the sake of his isolationism, is that Muslims have never needed a reason other than their religion to make war against whomever they choose. They started with war against the Orthodox church occupying much of the Holy Land. At the end of the first millennium they exapnded hostilities to Iberia and the Frankish Empire. In the present it is now the whole of the western world. Any non-Muslim nation is their enemy and their mandate is to claim all the world in the name of Allah.

I will more than grant that President Bush has been prone throughout his presidency to secular ideology, platitudes, and an ignorance of history. I do think that as an evangelical Christian he has taken a kind of tele-evangelist tone in his speeches on democracy. But none of the extremism that his opponents try to label him with have come to be truth. We never attacked Iran or North Korea; we have allowed Russia to rattle their saber in our hemisphere and invade a sovereign nation without action; we continue to progress in relations with China, hoping that capitalism will one day turn that nation as it did the former Soviet Union.

Yet I never heard Bush equate the motivations of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hizbollah with those of the American patriots of 1776; I have yet to read that he believes a terrorist is right in his belief that we are on an imperial conquest of the Middle East and thus justified to attack us; or that the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address were scant more than pieces of war propaganda. All these did Pat Buchanan espouse in this chapter, to the point that I wonder if he would be a Tory in the American Revolution, and a Grey during the Civil War.

All in all, this chapter must be read in light of Mr Buchanan's fervent belief that American foreign policy going back two decades is wholly based on imperial ends, and that America in general clearly needs to butt out and leave the world to destroy itself. For all of his impressive citings of history, Pat fails to consider context or that application of the past into the present could be like fixing an iPod with a wrench and hammer.

Even if I accepted his premise that Bush is a trigger-happy interventionist and at the beck and call of the Israeli state, Pat's uncompromising isolationism is cause for just as many potential problems outside American borders, and equally as extreme as his view on Bush. If this were 1790, 1803, 1853, or 1870 I would be inclined to agree with isolationist policy; but the combined presence of nuclear weapons, the blindingly fast evolution of technology, and the expansion of Muslim terrorism no longer makes Pat's arguments viable.