CHIEF INSIGHT: Isolationism ignores moral reality

February 16, 2012 by Ian Whitaker 

If there’s one thing in politics that makes me cringe, it’s liberals attempting to curry favor with moderates by praising reactionary conservatives. It’s fundamentally dishonest and just not good for business. The whole idea of having ideological opponents is disagreeing with them.

Ron Paul’s stances on economic issues repulse most people on the left and for good reason, but his antiquated foreign policy garners plaudits from tireless leftist revolutionaries like Glenn Greenwald and Robert Scheer. These honorable men, battered by their twilight underground struggles against Republicans on the Internet, have lost all grip on reality. But if sharing that kind of shameless bipartisan peace pipe doesn’t make you want to hurl, the fact that increasing numbers of students feel the same way should.

Paul is often praised for his “foresight” in opposing the Iraq War from the outset, but it doesn’t just come from bandoliered white men in makeshift forest compounds, it comes from many of the more politically-minded young people you might see around you while reading these pages.

Since the 60s there has been a slow but steady shift among young, liberal minded people against the precepts of internationalism (sorry libertarians, there’s really no cure for you).

Amid blind slogans like “no blood for oil,” students in particular have forgotten the original legacy of leftism forged by Polish dissidents, Spanish freedom fighters, Russian revolutionaries and others who fought for their beliefs.

Isolationist rhetoric that used to be the sole territory of the John Birch Society is now a hallmark of the “anti-war” left, which finds a natural home on some campuses. While Paul’s opposition to the intervention in Iraq is a result of a fundamental belief in staying neutral internationally, he’s managed to convince many liberal young people that the history doesn’t count.

First things first: Just because you were born in 1991 doesn’t mean life started then. Quite the opposite in fact: Innocent Iraqi women and children were being gunned down on the side of dusty roads by Saddam’s gunships in retaliation for an uprising that was encouraged by the U.S. military and then summarily not supported. Iranian youth were dying by Iraqi guns and machines paid for by the same parents who fed you Cheerios in the formative years of your life.

Ron Paul, however, is old enough to remember the rise of the Ba’ath party along with the CIA’s complicity, the events of the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War and the long train of human rights abuses by the Hussein regime. The truth is Ron Paul just doesn’t care. But you should.

In 80s Iraq as in 60s Vietnam, we have an example of a first-world nation using a developing country as a testbed for chemical warfare on civilian populations and predatory geopolitics that pitted sons and daughters against their own parents. In 1968 this would be cause for protest, but in 2012, the memory of Halabja has literally evaporated.

The United States of America, including its leaders and its citizens (yes, you in the skinny jeans too), is directly responsible for the subjugation and annihilation of Iraqi culture and civil society since 1979. For decades, American leaders and generals supported either through financial incentive or direct military aid, every crime up to genocide on Iraqi soil.

We can’t divorce ourselves from that history, no matter how much our politicians want to.

Curiously, Paul is absent from the record during this busy interval of American imperialism. His congressional career cut right through the most deadly years in Iraq’s history without seeing one bill to halt U.S. support for Saddam. Hilariously, his first co-sponsorship on the subject was a 1999 bill to stop military aid to defend Kosovar Muslims from being obliterated by Slobodan Milosevic. He was too late anyway, but at least Ronny tried. There’s no excuse for that kind of stupidity, but many students will rush to his defense.

There used to be a time when students stood up for the struggles of others in far countries and not star-struck politicians. The moral opposition to the Vietnam War by almost every university campus in the Western world was a sterling example of humanist principle elevated over small-minded, imperialist thinking. But fast forward to the new millennium and we seem to have lost our bite, not to mention our relevance.

Our politics has been invaded by a slew of mediocre pop culture icons and wanna-be activists from Michael Moore to Bono, from Sean Penn to Barbara Streisand, all trying to convince us that spending money on Arabs we’ve decimated is less important than repairing the road outside of the Ritz-Carlton.

It’s had a dumbing effect on the American polity, paving the way for irresponsible politicians like Paul to barge in and claim that the entire operation has been a “quagmire” or “failure” in order to dredge up support from war-weary voters.

It may still be considered en vogue to oppose the war (or what’s left of it), but use your head and tell me if your fashion sense is worth beggaring an entire nation of people.

Leaving Iraq alone in 2003 would have guaranteed at least another two decades of what Iraqi dissident and professor Kanan Makiya called a “republic of fear” and described as a mass grave underground and concentration camp above.

To be sure, the intervention has largely been plagued by incompetence and mismanagement, but the result is still a multi-ethnic parliamentary democracy for the first time in modern Iraqi history, where women have asserted themselves as strong leaders and the ability to escape the “developing” chains of a petroleum economy is well within grasp.

This is a victory amid our failure and our incompetence, and though we have withdrawn from Iraq for the most part, we have a moral stake in the survival of Iraqi society as a vibrant but fledgling democracy.

Should they require our assistance again, students should be the first to demand that their leaders do the principled thing, regardless of how their poll numbers might look.