The Wilsonians have control over the GOP’s foreign policy establishment. If anyone challenges them, they silence that individual. The GOP Trotskyites use the term isolationists against those who challenge them. Andrew McCarthy has stood up to them. They have smeared an attacked him. He has been called isolationist and other terms the Wilsonians use to keep Conservatives in line. He is not backing down and takes the fight to them.
Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Condoleezza Rice supported propping Qaddafi up with U.S. aid, including aid to his military. If Max was offended by that arrangement, if he inveighed against these U.S. government officials for supporting an incorrigibly anti-American homicidal dictator, I guess I missed it. Nevertheless, one of the reasons the Bush and Obama administrations regarded Qaddafi as a key ally was the fact that he was providing us with intelligence against Islamist operatives in his country — particularly, in eastern Libya — which, by percentage of population, was sending more jihadists to kill American troops in Iraq than any other country.
Many of these anti-American Islamists are part of the “rebels” — the polite name for the Libyan mujahideen who are Qaddafi’s opposition. Eastern Libya is their stronghold. They are supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose chief jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, has issued a fatwacalling for Muslims to kill Qaddafi, with the goal of toppling him and setting up a sharia state that would be just as anti-American as Qaradawi is. Furthermore, John Rosenthal has reportedhere on NRO in recent days that even Libya’s National Transitional Council admits that the rebels include Islamic extremists (though its spokesman lowballs them as “no more than 15 percent” of the rebels — as if that would make us feel better if it were true). As Mr. Rosenthal has also recounted, French analysts who have studied the “rebels” conclude that only a small minority of them are “true democrats” — in fact, the “rebels” are thoroughly infiltrated by al-Qaeda and its affiliates.
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For now, we must assume the concerns we have expressed about the “rebels” cannot be answered. With no vital U.S. interests at stake, and with our country engaged in multiple military excursions while teetering on the financial brink, pro-interventionists have made a mockery of domestic and international law.
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The Obama administration has steadfastly refused to do this, and the pro-interventionists have cheered the president on — despite the facts that (a) there is no international authorization for a war against Qaddafi, (b) the president has shamefully claimed that we are only in Libya to protect civilians even as U.S.-backed NATO forces wage war on his military and seek to kill him; (c) while ignoring Congress, the Obama administration consulted closely with the United Nations and the Arab League; and (d) the “responsibility to protect” doctrine that is guiding the Obama administration in Libya (see Stanley Kurtz’s essential essay, here) is a transnational progressive nostrum that ought to be anathema to conservatives and those who see American power as reserved for American interests.
I hope Andrew McCarthy and other real Conservatives keep up the good fight. Jacksonianism is back and the Wilsonian name calling will not make it go away. We are broke and this interventionist attitude must be defeated.
Tags: Andrew McCarthy, John McCain, Libyan War
