Thoughts in a Haystack

Tom Barry, the Policy Director of the International Relations Center, has an interesting article, "America's crusaders," that, among many other things, points out a great irony in the recent history of the U.S.:

[W]hile the ideology and faith-based politics of "America's enemies" routinely come under attack by U.S. social conservatives and neoconservatives as dangerous manifestations of radicalism, the ideology and faith-based politics of America's would-be defenders are presented as redemptive forces in world affairs.

Immediately after his electoral defeat in November 2006, Santorum announced his plans to carry his crusading politics into private life, which resulted in the creation of [the Ethics and Public Policy Center's] "America's Enemies" program. The program focuses on "identifying, studying, and heightening awareness of the threats posed to America and the West from a growing array of anti-Western forces that are increasingly casting a shadow over our future and violating religious liberty around the world."

Rather than regarding his overwhelming electoral defeat last November as an indicator that his own extreme notions about domestic and foreign policy were misguided, Santorum concluded that Americans are slumbering while at the gates gather barbarians such as "Islamic fascism."

Funny ... from inside America, it is people like Santorum who appear to be the nearest and greatest danger to those ideals of the Enlightenment that the Founders of this country, all revisionist history aside, revered as their inheritance from Western civilization. Santorum and his ilk share far more intellectually and morally with those "Islamic fascists" than they do with the likes of Jefferson and Madison.

The themes that echo through the rhetoric of the far Right are no accident:

Perhaps the most tragic development in U.S. foreign policy during the Bush presidency has been the reinstitution of a Manichean, Cold-War-like worldview, which has been promoted ably by social conservatives of the Religious Right and the neoconservatives in and outside the administration. Instead of working to reap the long-lost peace dividends that were supposed to emerge after the end of the bipolar confrontation, institutes like the EPPC, the Committee on the Present Danger, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, along with their influential spokespersons, are intent on propagating an imperial foreign policy that envisions the United States forever at war.

Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:33 AM