LAT: Nation-Building Exposes GOP's House Divided

[DeepModem Mom]

FOREIGN POLICY
Nation-Building Exposes GOP's House Divided
The neocon dream of exporting democracy clashes with the traditional Republican view of a foreign policy grounded in "realism."

By Jacob Heilbrunn. Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer at The Times.


WASHINGTON — The longer the U.S. struggles to impose order in postwar Iraq, the harsher the indictments of the Bush administration's foreign policy are becoming. "Acquiring additional burdens by engaging in new wars of liberation is the last thing the United States needs," declared one Bush critic in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. "The principal problem is the mistaken belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world's ills, and that the United States has a responsibility to promote democratic government wherever in the world it is lacking."

Sound like a Democratic pundit bashing Bush for partisan gain? Nope. The jab came from Dimitri K. Simes, president of the predominantly Republican Nixon Center and co-publisher of the National Interest magazine. And he is not alone in calling on the administration to reclaim the party's pre-Reagan heritage — to abandon its moralistic, Wilsonian, neoconservative dream of exporting democracy, in favor of a more limited and realistic foreign policy.

The most profound foreign affairs ideological divide in the 2004 election might not be so much between liberals and conservatives as it will be among conservatives themselves. A growing number of so-called "realists," who feel that U.S. foreign policy should be shaped by a narrowly defined national interest rather than by a broad desire to promote global democracy and human rights, have gotten increasingly vociferous in warning about the perils of adventurism abroad.

These critics, unlike the anti-imperialists of the left, don't view U.S. power with antipathy: They revere it. But they fear squandering the country's might and are fond of recalling 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke's warning: "I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread being too much dreaded." They see neoconservatives like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol as championing big government in the service of social engineering abroad. The debate between realists and neoconservatives over U.S. power and moralism could prove as poisonous to the Republicans as the foreign policy fights that racked the Democratic Party during the 1970s and 1980s....


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-op-heilbrunn21mar21,1,450955.story?coll=la-home-politics

[acmavm]

1. Seems like the shit is hitting the fan, so to speak. Even die-hard

conservatives are fed up with the neocon con.

[snippy]

2. But the United States is "a nation with a mission."

I have been surprised by the lack of reaction to this Bushshit:

. . . by our actions we have shown what kind of nation we are. We're a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We believe that freedom is the right of every single person in the world. By the unselfish dedication of Americans in uniform, people in our own country and in lands far away, people can live in freedom and know the peace that freedom brings.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040217-5.html