Isolationism and Internationalism...

[fastpat]

There are those on this forum who are confused about Isolationism, so this article's short history of it should be illuminating.

President Bush's Metamorphosis in Foreign Policy
by Ivan Eland

President Bush is now warning against a retreat into isolationism and has begun recommending international engagement. This from a man who morphed a campaign pledge of adopting a more humble foreign policy into virtually unilateral invasion of Iraq - another sovereign nation posing little threat to the United States. In the past six years, the president has undergone an interesting metamorphosis: from isolationist to muscular unilateralist to advocate of international engagement.

The root of the president's change of heart has been a defensive reaction to the debacle in Iraq. First, taken by surprise even after being warned about a possible post-invasion insurgency, he has had to substitute Republican nation-building for the Clinton administration's Democratic nation-building, which he so despised for being armed social work. Second, his new internationalist* pose allows him to smear critics who advocate a withdrawal from Iraq as isolationists. But this tactic is nothing new.

At the turn of the last century, Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval strategist who was pushing for a large U.S. naval force to dominate the globe, coined the dreaded I-word to discredit those who supported the traditional, more restrained foreign policy originally instituted by the nation's founders. Ever since then, interventionists have tried to attach this general label to critics of any particular overseas military adventure. The name-calling gets especially intense when interventionists are trapped in a failed brushfire war, such as Iraq. Critics who see the writing on the wall and want to cut U.S. losses are accused of cutting and running or of aiding the enemy. These accusations of cowardice and near treason are designed to deflect the critics' searing questions about the interventionist policy: why the ill-advised military action was undertaken in the first place and how the United States has aided future enemies by showing them how to fight the United States using guerrilla tactics and by providing a haven and training ground for terrorists in Iraq. READ THE FULL ARTICLE http://antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=8699

*An internationalist is another word for a Trotskyite communist.

[Mulhollanddose]

anti-war.com is a neo-communist front organization, founded and bearing the name of the neo-communist Randolph Bourne...It is no wonder Patsy spews the same talking points of the most radical of the rabid ultra-left.

These scumbags are still putting forward the big lie that America was responsible for Saddam and the UN starving Iraqis as they got rich.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Mulhollanddose
anti-war.com is a neo-communist front organization, founded and bearing the name of the neo-communist Randolph Bourne...It is no wonder Patsy spews the same talking points of the most radical of the rabid ultra-left.

Odd that a man who died in 1918 would be labeled a neo-communist, but since Mul-berry labels all who opppose the Bush'ist warfare state the same, it's not surprising. Here's Bourne's information for all to see:

Randolph Bourne 1886-1918

John Dos Passos wrote that if ever a man had a ghost, it was Bourne:

A tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone
streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.
Dos Passos, 1919 (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), pp. 105-106.

When World War I erupted it came as a surprise to the overwhelming majority of American intellectuals. Its barbarity stuck them as anachronistic and they tended to view the conflict as a temporary sidetrack in the march of civilization, an expression of residual animal instincts. The dawn of the Enlightenment and the tremendous progress made in the Nineteenth Century made war seem quite uncharacteristic (in their view) of humanity's evolving nature.

Of course, they saw themselves as important and instrumental in defining and fine tuning that nature. On the leading edge of political and social brilliance, ivy-league educated, born to lead and with the silver spoon in the mouth to prove it, they were socialists. And when President Woodrow Wilson (who had been re-elected as a peace candidate under the slogan, "He kept us out of war") opted to throw the full weight of the country's resources into the European conflict, they rallied to his support.

Randolph Bourne, who was to die in the flu epidemic shortly after the Armistice, cried out alone against the betrayal of the values of civilization by his fellow writers. He and his magazine paid a heavy price and, of course, he did not live to see the backlash following the war. The damage had been done; the stage was set for the idiocy of the conditions at Versailles, the ascendency of Adolph Hitler, the unimaginable horrors of National Socialism, and the destruction of the cities of Europe within the next thirty years.

Bourne's articles appeared in a magazine, The Seven Arts. Two of his essays, The War and the Intellectuals and War is the Health of the State appear here. I hope that these may prompt a new generation's student to pursue further research into the brief life and ideas of a man who, as Dos Passos wrote, does indeed have a ghost.
http://www.bigeye.com/rbourne.htm

These scumbags are still putting forward the big lie that America was responsible for Saddam and the UN starving Iraqis as they got rich.

America isn't responsible for the above, the US government is. That is the whole truth, which you hate to see in print, but I'll be here to rub your nose in it every chance I get.