This is the tale of my most unwilling conversion from Conservative
Republican to Liberal Democrat. I'm still not fully converted, for many
of my friends are still Repubs. I write this only on the request of
another Kossack,
BarbinMD
, for over the next year or two, I will bet my last dollar you will be
seeing hundreds more like me, coming out of their foxholes in your
direction. I am still distinctly uncomfortable among this many
Liberals, and if this diary seems self-serving, may it serve as some
delineation of what we will look like, as we arrive.
I was a neoconservative before the word had been invented.
Part the First: The Fish Rots from the
Head.
My first inklings of conversion happened the year Richard Nixon and
Henry Kissinger sold out the Hmong and the Vietnamese. I hate
totalitarian Communism as only someone who has seen it up and personal
can hate anything in this life. Communism is the weed which only grows
in the soil plowed by feudalism for a few centuries. Like a virus, it
comes to life when conditions are right, and a country's oligarchy
begins to lose its grip on the population.. Without a doubt, Communism
has led to the deaths and enslavement of millions of people, the
destruction of entire cultures. A crack in my Republican facade
appeared with Iran-Contra, but more significant was Reagan's failure to
revenge the
deaths
of the Marines murdered by Hizb'allah in Lebanon. Yet my conversion
would not happen until well into the late 1990s, and then only in small
part.
For in those days, as hypocrites will, I rationalized away my
misgivings. Well, Nixon was a bastard, but Kissinger was a bigger
bastard. Even then, I had suspicions about Kissinger being the
war criminal
Christopher
Hitchens has so accurately described. Well, yeah Ford
was feckless, but he was badly advised, and merely a caretaker
president. Carter I grudgingly admired for the first moral
foreign policy in a generation, but his confiscatory tax policies and
domestic agenda were noxious. Furthermore, under the Carter
administration, a certain nauseating shade of avocado green became all
the rage: like Nabokov, I am sensitive to colors, and the
Bicentennial was an unending ordeal of execrable taste best described
by Frank Zappa in
Poofter's
Froth Wyoming Plans Ahead. Carter's chief mistake was
tolerating the presence of the Shah on American soil, leading to the
holding of American hostages in Iran. Carter meddled in
Afghanistan, and Reagan fueled that fire: we built Tora Bora for
the Taliban, and created the monster which would return, unloved and
enraged, like Victor Frankenstein's monster, to wreak a terrible
revenge on its creator in 2001.
Reagan took considerably more justifying. His parlous lapses from
grace began early. As a fiscal conservative, I was appalled to
see the glaciers of capital in the Savings and Loans melt and flood the
economy, vastly enriching carpetbaggers and Reagan cronies. The
Reagan deficits were appalling. Iran-Contra enraged me. To
this day, I cannot look at the television to see
John Negroponte
without the strong urge to kick the screen. To think , the man
who built an entire military airfield with
State
Department money, the architect of America's first secret offshore
detention and torture camp,
El
Aguacate, is now
Director of
National Intelligence. I was still in uniform when Reagan
called the USSR the Evil Empire.
Part the Second: Cassandra warns
the Trojans.
I had predicted, as early as 1982, the fall of the Soviet Union:
Reagan did not bring down Communism, and his doctrine of Star Wars was
well understood by those of us in the military to be a lie made of
whole cloth. Still, my rationalizing went in this
wise: Reagan was by far America's oldest president, and much evil
went on in the basement while the Old Guy was upstairs napping.
Whilst Saddam Hussein was waging a monstrously cruel and unprovoked war
against Iran, Reagan and Rumsfeld were sending arms to both sides of
that war. I studied the battle for Khorramshar while it was going
on:
the largest land battle in the history of the world. Stalingrad
had 10
million men, it is estimated
Khorramshar
had 12 million men present, Khomeini claimed to have an army of 20
million. A million men died in that war. When Iran
developed a fleet of pirogues with machine guns to get through the
swamps, and began to make headway against Saddam, threatening an end
run around the siege, Saddam fired poison gas into that swamp.
Probably killed more of his own men than those of Iran, but he stopped
the advance. Such was the Realpolitik of the time, but yet I
soldiered on, believing Reagan was an aberration.
Another crack appeared in my Republican veneer: Osama bin Laden
had
appeared on my radar, long before, in the bad old days of Carter and
Reagan, as a moneyed prince in the
Maktab
al-Khadamāt , the financial engine behind the Afghan
mujahidin. Read George Criles'
Charlie
Wilson's War,
a true account of that war, so bizarre it could not be made up.
May I
add in passing, the United States may come to regret arming the Iraqis
in this day and age, as we came to regret the creation of the Taliban,
hoodwinked by the Pakistani ISI into backing the worst sect of Islam,
the
Deobandi.
Bush the Wiser was a mystery to me then and now. One of my first
consulting engagements after leaving the service was FSLIC as Receiver,
writing a system to automate the handling of the assets of failed
Savings and Loans. I remember going through a little plastic box
of 3x5 cards, one for each mortgage's payment history, a woman's neat
handwriting, one entry for each payment, and a series of scratched-out
numbers for the outstanding balance. Every day I felt miserable
leaving work, but still clung to some vestige of hope for fiscal sanity
from Bush41's administration: it did not come. It seemed a bit
unfair, Reagan had led the country on a merry drunken toot, and Bush
got the economic hangover. Gulf War One was an act of unmitigated
stupidity, propping up one of the evillest little monarchies in the
world, the Emir of Kuwait,
in
whose kingdom slavery. and especially
child
slavery is still tolerated. The one useful lesson to emerge from
Gulf War One was put in words by a Pakistani general, the only way to
stand up to the USA was to acquire a nuclear weapon. While other
Republicans cheered themselves hoarse, I told my friends to be
cautious, this war was but half-fought. Like Cassandra, doomed to
foretell the truth yet be disbelieved, I said my peace, hunkered down
and watched.
If Bush was a mystery, Clinton baffled me utterly. Clinton is
perhaps the most adept politician to ever enter the White House, and I
must confess to genuinely liking the man. His flaws, and they
were many, were the flaws of a great man, and his like will not soon
come again. He was almost an idiot savant, playing to every
audience with a preternatural grace. I was on a gig in
Bethesda, MD, and took to drinking in Levante's, somewhere off
Wisconsin Avenue. Met two lobbyists, on opposite sides of an
issue, and was told a curious tale I have no reason to doubt.
Both were scheduled to meet Clinton on the same day. There's a
green room where visitors to the Oval Office are readied for their
fifteen minutes of fame. Lobbyist A was in the green room, and
saw Lobbyist B leaving the Oval Office. That evening, B was
waiting for A, to give A the bad news: Clinton told him he backed
B's side. Lobbyist A arrived, with his thumbs up, and assured B
of Clinton's support for A's position. Both looked at each other,
disgusted: Clinton would say anything to anyone. This
may be more common in that Babylon on the Potomac than I am aware, but
it speaks to my feelings about Bill Clinton.
I repeat: I was a neoconservative, and believed in the USA's
right to intervene where force was required. Clinton's war
against the Serbian aggression was probably necessary, but there were
no Good Guys in that fight. Clinton wisely withdrew from Somalia,
there was no winning that fight. I was depressed by Clinton's
failure to act in Rwanda, but the logistics would have been
nightmarish. Yet when Clinton did go after Osama bin Laden, lo
the Republicans arose with one voice to screech "Monica!
Monica! Wag the Dog!" It was a horrid spectacle of
unprincipled partisanship. The cracks had widened enough to where
I no longer agreed with the Republicans on much of anything. I
was a Republican in name only.
Part the Third: The Final Break.
When George Bush
smeared
John McCain in the 2000 campaign, I prayed the Republicans would
not nominate Bush the Dumber. My prayers went
unanswered. I had always liked Al Gore, though he had come to
reverse his positions over his long career in the Congress. I was
iffy about Gore, but knew I could never vote for Bush. I voted
for Gore, more as a vote against George the Dumber than anything else.
The Republican Party I knew as a boy is gone. All parties
evolve: Neil Gaiman put an odd bit of Latin into The Sandman;
omnia mutantur, nihil interit = all
changes, yet nothing is lost. Nobody will ever confuse
Bush's second inaugural speech with Lincoln's second inaugural
speech. Bush seems to be a vile transmogrification of a
Republican, a revenant Ronald Reagan, without the Alzheimer's
Disease. The politics of hatred and wedge issues are
effective and easy, they are the moral equivalent of the barrels of
whiskey furnished in early American politicking, to whip up the troops.
Part the Fourth: The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth
the Hermit to shrieve
him ; and the penance of life falls on him.
Whole forests must be felled and made into paper, server farms expanded
by terabytes to enumerate and document the deviltry and monstrous
deceits of Bush the Dumber. Yet all will fall on deaf ears, until
Liberals reach out to Republicans. May I urge you especially not
to condemn people of faith, regardless of your own positions on
religion's long history of injustice, and the scurrilous antiscientific
bent of the current debate. We must become the Party of Science,
and oppose this nonsense from the facts. When the Liberals have
the courtesy to reach out to Conservatives, where they are, without the
cant and diatribe of condemning them en masse, your voices as Liberals
will be heard.
Part the Last: A Self-Indulgent History
My identity is shaped by the example of Jesus Christ, my heritage and
the grim truths of the
Sun
Tzu Bing Fao.
My family has produced American soldiers since Colonial Williamsburg. I
am a third generation Protestant missionary's child. John Birch
stood
up at my grandparent's wedding in China. My grandparents narrowly
escaped China in 1941, warned by OSS agents in Kunming: most of my
mother's friends died in Japanese concentration camps. My
grandparents
started Carver Bible Institute, the first pastor training for black
ministers, in an abandoned pool hall in East Point, Georgia, and the
Klan was a real and constant menace. Martin Luther King, both
senior
and junior were friends of our family. I spent my childhood in
Niger
Republic and Nigeria, and was present for the Biafran War. My
mother
and father identified and stopped one of the last outbreaks of smallpox
in the world, in the Sahel of Niger. My wife and I have built
fifteen
libraries in Guatemala, and my family has worked with refugees all
their lives. I am a patriot, a veteran, and the very last person
I
would have thought would have become a Liberal. The Army and flag
my
family has proudly served for six generations has been forever stained
with ignominy at Abu Ghraib. I am deeply and personally ashamed
of my
country for the first time in my life, and my anger cannot be described
in mere words. I pray and hope this country may once regain its
place in the world, a more perfect union.