Just who is looking unpatriotic now?
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The right-wingers of America are really worked up about the current international crisis. They're demanding the heads of those leftist politicians inside the Beltway who are selling out our men on the front lines.
Our soldiers in Iraq? No, our border agents in Texas, specifically Ignacio Ramos and Jose Campean. You may never have heard of them, but everyone in America worthy of the label "right-winger" has, if my e-mail is any indication.
Ramos and Campean used to patrol the border looking for drug smugglers. But then they found one. And now they're in federal prison.
The alleged smuggler? He's not only free; he's suing the United States for $5 million. He's demanding compensation for having been shot in the butt while fleeing after Ramos and Campean caught him with a truckful of marijuana.
He made it back to Mexico, but U.S. government officials gave him immunity from prosecution so he could return to the U.S. and testify against the two officers. They got terms of 11 and 12 years. Ramos was beaten recently after federal officials thoughtfully put him in with a bunch of illegal alien felons.
This has the right wing in an uproar. Right-wingers have been imploring Bush to pardon the agents, but administration spokesman Tony Snow has dismissed that proposal as "nonsensical." The ensuing flap has caused consterna tion among Bush's dwindling number of supporters on the right. How, they ask, could a conservative administration take the side of a foreign drug smuggler against American border agents?
Perhaps it's because Bush has always put the interests of foreigners first. Bush has, from the very beginning, been the most openly internationalist president since Woodrow Wilson. He's always talking about the great things he wants to do for Mexicans, Iraqis and oth ers with American tax dollars.
Back in the early days of the Iraq war, this neoconservative internationalism seemed to be eclips ing the isolationist sentiment of traditional conservatives. The seminal work in this regard was a March 2003 piece in National Review by neoconservative David Frum headlined "Unpatriotic Conservatives."
In it, Frum attacked those old- line conservatives who had warned that an open-ended "war on terror" could not possibly succeed. He quoted with disapproval Lew Rockwell, a libertarian who argued that "the War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is sup posed to achieve."
Frum also attacked columnist Robert Novak for arguing that the United States should concentrate on eliminating al Qaeda rather than other Mideastern terror groups such as Hezbollah. "While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is fo cused on the destruction of Israel," Novak had written.
Frum, however, pointed out that Hezbollah had indeed twice attacked American embassies and had hit U.S. targets as recently as October 1983 in Lebanon.
True enough, but guess which Mideastern terrorist group at tacked a U.S. embassy even more recently than that? That would be the Dawa party, the same Dawa party to which Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki belongs. Dawa truck-bombed our Kuwait embassy on Dec. 12, 1983. And Ma liki, by the way, is an open supporter of Hezbollah.
Frum, of course, had no way of knowing back in 2003 that the government that would soon be coming to power in Iraq would have closer ties to anti-American terrorism than the government we were ousting. But when you set up a democracy in a land where the majority of the people belong to a religion headed by an Iranian-born ayatollah, you can safely predict that the leaders will reflect that ayatollah's views.
One of the right-wingers at tacked as unpatriotic in that essay, Pat Buchanan, has been crowing about that very point recently.
"In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbol lah, Hamas and Shia militants with ties to Iran," Buchanan wrote the other day. "If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the proposition of the U.S. military out and Israel gone, how does Bush think it would come out?"
Buchanan was writing such things even before the Iraq invasion, which is how he got labeled "unpatriotic" by Frum. Since the war, however, it is the neoconserva tives whose patriotism looks a bit suspect. This blowup over the Border Patrol is just the latest symptom.
To defend Bush these days, you have to be willing to defend throw ing border agents in jail for shooting smugglers, blowing CIA agents' cover for political gain and getting thousands of GIs killed to create an Islamic republic.
The only thing saving Bush, I suspect, is that the party of Wilson is every bit as internationalist as the Grand Old Party. Democrats are therefore unable to mount a coherent critique of Bush's bungling. Good thing for him or he'd be the first president to have a popularity ratings in the single digits.
Paul Mulshine may be reached at pmulshine@starleger.com.
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