ConservativeINC

Before Reagan was president our political ideology was dominated by people who were isolationists or at least realists. They believed that we cannot go around the world trying to change the way other countries act. Rather then favoring policies that were designed to affect change in the government’s of hostile nations we advocated coexistence with countries like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Everything changed with Reagan though.

It became the stated goal of the American government that the Soviet Union should be defeated. Reagan actively aided groups that were opposed to communism around the world and frequently gave speeches aimed at weakening the Soviet regime. In the end our intimated bellicosity staved off a nuclear world war and helped bring about the end of the Evil Empire. Hot of that success one might think we should have applied this newfound tenet of conservatism elsewhere to other totalitarian regimes. Regimes that could one day bring a war to the shores of America.

But that didn’t happen. In between then and 9-11 we protected an ally in the Middle East and bombed a European nation that holds little strategic value to America’s interests. Our military devolved into a shell of its former self and took part in half-ass “peace keeping” missions throughout the world. We largely checked out of international issues and let thugocracies thrive. This noninterventionist strategy brought the worst terrorist attack in history to our shores and sucked us into a worldwide war on Islamofascism.

Thugocracies - whether they be communist, theocratic, or some other type of tyranny - have always plagued this world and always will. And the key to understanding this situation is that while thugocracies are fundamentally flawed constructions by evil men and women they don’t just collapse. They need a push, sometimes a shove, to finally topple over and bring freedom to the people who live within its borders.

Reagan knew this. The Soviet Union was never going to just topple over. It was like a neglected barn. Every year it kept on breaking down but every year it remained standing. Sure, its condition was increasing decrepit but it was stubborn as hell. To take the sucker down you would have to take out the remaining wood and then put enough pressure on the structure so that it would topple over. And that’s just what we did with the Soviets.

We supported worker’s unions, we forced them to increase defense spending, we supported religion, we did a thousand different things that systematically undermined that thugocracy and forced it beyond its breaking point. If anything should have been learned from Reagan’s international policies it should be that you have to bring down these rogue regimes before they can get a chance to bring down everyone else.

But we forgot those lessons. And many within our movement still haven’t remembered them. They continue to hem and haw over the uncertainties that come along with major policy changes. The Iraq War has often not looked good so they advocated restraint in other hot spots. Even some major conservative icons, like William F. Buckley, have talked out against the Iraq War. But this isn’t the time to be timid with foreign policy, this is the time when chances need to be taken and vision needs to lead us because if we are timid and fail to act then we are going to pay for it dearly in the future.

And I think that this is what conservatism needs to stand for now. There has been a virulent strain of isolationism that has gone right through the heart of conservatism for a very long time now. At first glance it does make sense; we are for independence, self determination, and everything that goes with that. But when you dig deeper isolationism ceases to make sense.

Our Founders wrote into the Declaration of Independence that it is man’s nature to live in a bad situation without doing anything. And seeing all those billions of people who continue to live in thugocracies all over the world just validates that point. That fact is why nations like the Soviet Union weren’t collapsing when they should have. People are beasts of habit and will continue living under the worse conditions because that is all they know. Can we afford not to be proactive and give these people the push they need to change their situation? I don’t think so.

Isolationism needs to once and for all die. Everything that happens in the world is connected to everything else. China’s booming economy is not just an interesting occurrence to be marveled at nor is Venezuela’s deteriorating God-given right to liberty just something to frown upon. Both these examples and everything else that happens in the world has an affect on America and the way we live our lives. Standing on the sidelines cheering and booing isn’t going to solve any of our problems.

And it’s not going to suffice if we just join more international groups and have more high level diplomatic meetings. Diplomacy isn’t something that works all that well when there’s a chance the opposing sides think they might find themselves at war someday. Diplomacy works between friends but not enemies or even adversaries. But what can we do?

The most important thing we need to do is improve our own economy. A strong American economy will dissuade any untoward advances by the thugocracies because they will know that we have more than enough money to buy their destruction. Furthermore, if the American economy is leading the world we will continue to have a major influence on everyone else. The way to a vibrant economy is simple: pare taxes and regulations. I would love a flat tax but I will take continued reductions in taxes until that happy day. I also don’t think companies should be taxed, at least not as highly as they are now. It is ridiculous what limits our tax code puts on people and companies in America. We just need to follow the lead of the former Soviet Bloc countries with regards to tax issues.

Shoring up our economy is vitally important because it allows us to do many different things. But a strong economy alone isn’t the silver bullet. Our leadership must also denounce every thugocracy on the planet. If the president forcefully exposed China for the communist thugs that they are we would be at least planting the seed in people’s minds that the world would be better if China were free. More importantly, we need to get that word to the people of China because it is going to be ultimately up to them to change the wretched conditions that they live in.

Beyond these steps it would also be prudent if we used our clandestine assets in a manner that undermined the power of the thugocracies. Let’s bring terror to these terror masters. Use our assets to work with opposition groups, sabotage the ruling class, and whatever else they think will undermine the thugs. Thugocracies have closed societies and we need to punch a hole in their armor to let in the light.

And whenever one of the thugs gets so brazen as to strike on American soil we need to retaliate in a much more severe fashion. When the terrorists struck us on 9-11 we shouldn’t have stopped with Afghanistan and Iraq. The tribal lands of Pakistan should have been fair game, Syria and Iran should have been ventured into once they started attacking us in Iraq, and we should have been more forceful with our victories. If they attack us we will hit them back 100 times harder.

Conservatives must realize that isolationism is dead. This isn’t the 19th century when it took weeks to travel across the country. We live in a world where a goat herder in Afghanistan can topple a building with some training. In accordance with the situation we find ourselves in we need to embrace an ideology that requires us to be proactive when dealing with external threats posed by thugocracies. The Bush Doctrine of bringing democracy to the Middle East was a decent opening gambit but it requires a sustained effort forevermore because the threats we face will never die off. Conservatives, for now on, must support our country’s undermining of thugocracies if we want to keep America safe and continue to keep it the strongest country in the world. BigT

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Everyday is frightening for leftists because everyday they see evil neocons lurking around the corner plotting a preemptive attack on some country 95% of Americans could not pinpoint on a map. To the liberals preemptive war is seen as this new tactic developed by (Jew [read it with a hiss]) conservatives so that they can control more of the world’s oil supply. I guess no one on the left got the memo that the Kennedy’s are staying drowned in vodka thanks to oil dividends. Oh well, someone should tell them though. Back to the article.

Preemptive war is a perfectly legitimate military option. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if someone had attacked Germany in the mid 1930s? How about if someone had gone into Russia in the early 20th century and deposed the communists? The Israelis have done it taking out nuclear facilities the most recent of which was in Syria. And it just makes tactical sense.

Let’s say you know that a nation is going to attack you. You could always send diplomats but they rarely succeed at more then sewing their seed in different countries. Or you could strike before the other guy does. That’s what I would do.

This doesn’t mean go all in with a conventional war. But it does mean you can wage a war against your enemy in other ways. Sabotage, support of dissident groups, or other methods of undermining their regime. Perhaps the greatest preemptive war fought in recent times was Reagan’s preemptive flourish against the Soviets. If he had not used the threat of war against the Evil Empire it would not have fallen. So, in essence, we won that preemptive war without ever firing a single bullet (don’t bring up the proxy wars right now).

In fact I think that the best thing to do is to be proactive about conflicts. Without being proactive about countries like Iran we risk being thrown into a much worse war with them later on. Our only option is to face the problem right now before things can get worse.

Fight Iran with other weapons then bombs and bullets though. Don’t fight them with sanctions because they only serve to piss off the country and increase their standing among their neighbors and other sympathetic (emphasis on pathetic) parties. Fight them in a more nuanced way.

Support trade unions in the country. Do what Reagan did and create a strike fund for the workers. Have them do nationwide strikes and cripple the government.

Increase our own military spending. Go through with the missile shield in Eastern Europe. Hell, extend that shield to Israel while we’re at it. Make it so that they can’t just lob bombs and win a war. This will also force them to spend a hell of a lot more money developing their own weapons. Bleed them dry.

Make sure that the people in Iran can get access to real news. Get them access to radio, television, satellite, and internet sources of information. Make it so that everyone in the country knows the truth about what their country is doing and the truth about what is going outside the country as well.

Freeze the accounts of those in the leadership, free up our businesses to make deals with Iranian businesses, and seriously fund opposition groups. Freezing the assets of the ruling class may not be plausible but slowly draining their bank accounts over a couple of decades is doable. Give the money to the opposition groups. And letting our business guys do business with their business guys will foster goodwill, improve our economy and the economy of the Iranians who oppose Ahmadinejad’s crew, and will give us some badly needed human intelligence in the country.

And there needs to be our own special ops guys in that country. When the bad guys try to strong arm people who support change we can send them a message. Blow up one of the thugs’ houses, kill one of them, basically make it known that if you try to hurt one of our friends we’re going to hurt you back ten times harder.

Proactively and preemptively attacking Iran and other hostile nations in this manner would help end conventional wars. Doing it this way would help put the impetus on the Iranian citizens who are the ones who should want change the most. Help them start and complete the revolution they can’t do on their own. I think if we gave the citizens of countries like Iran, North Korea, and Syria a lot of support and a push in the right direction they will eventually take over.

It is working in Iraq now. I think Iraq is probably the most extreme case of preemptive war available because we precluded ourselves from waging an asymmetrical war against that thugocracy. But we have come a lot further then I thought we would have by this point. At minimum I thought it was going to take a generation before Sunni and Shiite could work together on such a large scale in Iraq. Now they are working together against their shared enemy in al Qaeda.

But many have died when they didn’t have to. If we had been actively undermining Saddam’s regime all along we might not have had to go into Iraq when we did. There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have responded to our attempts in his historically brutal fashion. All that means is that we would have to have been more brutal to his regime killing and threatening them in more brutal ways.

I truly think that these tactics would work to bring about change in the most repressive regimes. It would require our bravest and finest men and women (women are some of the best spies, you figure it out) to do some brutal things to other “human” beings. If you don’t have the stomach for this then just don’t look. Preemptively attacking a hostile nation in this asymmetric fashion could prevent a much larger war in the future and that is what is so important and so necessary about preemptive war. BigT

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One of the most ingenious characteristics of our Constitution is that there are a separation of powers between the Legislative, Executive and Judiciary. What this system does is limits the powers that each individual branch can yield by making the other branches watchdogs, so to speak. The Executive (the President) has the power to wage war and make treaties with other nations. The Legislative (house and senate) has the power to declare and fund war as well as the power to ratify treaties. The judiciary really wasn’t designed to have any power over the foreign relations sphere of our nation’s policy.

On the domestic side of all this the legislative branch has a lot of power. From the house comes all spending bills. The senate is bestowed with the authority of confirming judges and other political appointments made by the executive branch. Both houses of the legislative branch can also override a presidential veto. The Executive branch has the bully pulpit and has the authority make bills into law by signing them and has the responsibility of enforcing those laws. The judiciary branch has the authority to adjudicate disputes between those two branches on constitutional grounds and is charged with the ability of deciding criminal and civil cases based on the laws that were ratified by the other two branches.

You are probably thinking right now that this is all fine and dandy but things no longer even remotely resemble these facts. We have judges making policy, the legislative branch is trying to run a war and the executive branch has become a cheerleader for all this. The purpose of this post is not to castigate the government for its many and varied failures but it to explain from a conservative perspective why the separation of powers in a national government is vital to any free state.

The natural state of government is to try and steal as much power it can. It wants to control everything and everyone because it knows better. It works day and night figuring out new ways to “help” us while all along it is stealing away our freedoms. It is a vicious beast and the only way to limit its power is to have it attack itself.

The separation of powers is designed to pit each branch against the other. They are suppose to make sure that no branch is infringing upon its powers. Executive is suppose to fight with the Legislative and the Judicial and the same goes for the other branches as well.

Constitutionally instilled infighting was created so that we would not find ourselves in a totalitarian regime. The Executive branch would have to exert a tremendous amount of effort, get extremely lucky, and weather the storm that would surely come if it ever wanted to just outright take over the country. Let’s be serious, it can’t happen with our current system, as dilapidated as it might be. Creating a system that institutionally checked the power was ingenious.

The biggest threat I see to this balance is the fourth branch that wasn’t accounted for in the constitutional separation of powers: the bureaucracy. This virulent branch of the government has grown uncontrollably for the last 100 years and doesn’t show much signs of slowing down.

And the problem is that there isn’t a branch that is showing any interest in really cracking down on the bureaucracy’s power. Why would they? Bureaucrats don’t have to get elected, they don’t have terms limits, they really don’t have a constitutional limitations on their power, just those progressively less restrictive limitations that are put on them by the other branches.

Why should the other branches, specifically the Executive and Legislative, want to limit this fourth branch? It is beneficial for their reelection prospects to increase the size of this fourth branch as much as possible. Reelection minded politicians in both elected branches try to position themselves in the best possible light; Constitution be damned. They’ll willingly bestow tons of power on the bureaucracy to improve their chances of reelection.

As a conservative the growing strength of this unelected, constitution-proof fourth branch of bureaucrats frightens me. Even if individual bureaucrats were targeted for prosecution for violating the Constitution or the more normal, mundane law there will be another one (probably more to make sure it doesn’t happen again) that will take the convicts place. Just the law of averages stipulates that there will be massive fraud and mismanagement in this branch.

What can be done? It is hard to see a way to cut down the size of this branch right now. No one is really campaigning on shrinking the size of the government. So that’s out. Could we possibly write the bureaucracy into the Constitution through an Amendment? I don’t know, at least it’s not on the table. Or even close. I’m sorry to say this but there is no easy, quick fix to this increasingly troubling and dangerous problem.

It will be a long battle that we need to win though. The separation of powers can only work if there is power to separate. The bureaucracy is pilfering that power piece by piece every day and won’t stop until there power starts to be drained. By electing conservatives who treasure the Constitution we will begin to overthrow this plight on our country that has warped the purpose of the Constitution. If we fail to do this there will be no need to cherish the separation of powers because all the power will belong to the fourth branch. BigT

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