How the government bamboozles us on foreign policy

Posted on: December 26, 2016 at 11:01:32 CT

One misconception to overturn is that if you are skeptical of, or an outright opponent of, your government's foreign policy, then probably you must be a pinko commie who hates America and all this other stuff.

People who do not believe a word of what the government says when it comes to milk subsidies, or agriculture policy, or whatever, shouldn't necessarily assume that everything the Pentagon says is sacred scripture. The same kind of skepticism ought to run in a natural continuum across all these sorts of things.

And I used to be a typical neoconservative: whatever the government told me on foreign policy I'm sure must be right, and anything going on overseas is simply the righteous might of the United States government dispensing summary justice against the bad guys, and who are you to ask about this, and if you are worried about civilian casualties, again you're a pinko. I went through this whole thing.

But then I finally came to the conclusion, actually by just mindlessly adopting this position, I'm involving myself in all kinds of moral outrages because I'm falling in this trap of believing this, really, left wing Rousseauean myth that, "We ARE the government, and WE are bombing them, and WE'RE going to get them." And so the "we" makes you feel like, "Well, gee, I'm implicated in this, too. So, darn it! Anyone who criticizes this foreign policy is criticizing me. No way, baby! WE are in this…" But it's not "we". The relatively small number of people who run the U.S. government is not "we", it's "them" it's "they". We don't say, "Well, gee. We are taxing ourselves," or "WE put me in jail for a wetland violation of my property." We wouldn't say "we," we would say "they".

And the same thing follows in this case. I'll give you just one example: In the 1990s it was a totally bipartisan policy, and by the way, anytime something's a bipartisan policy, you can guarantee it's evil, always and everywhere. There was a bipartisan policy to impose sanctions on Iraq and a great many people died of malnutrition as a result of it, now the number is in dispute, but the fact that people died because they weren't allowed to get equipment to repair their water treatment facilities and things like that, that's beyond question, and that was deeply inhumane, and if the Soviet Union had done it, we never would have heard the end of it. "Oh, look at the commies! Of course they hate human life, and they're terrible!" But as soon as it's OUR ruling class that does it, well immediately the so-called skeptics of government, the conservatives, got right in line immediately rushing to defend this policy, and after awhile I just decided, "You know, I just can't defend these people anymore. I cannot defend that type of thing." It is deeply immoral to do something like that. Just because somebody is your enemy there are still things you are not allowed to do to him, especially when the actual general public of that country has done nothing to you." This is just the simple basic insight that conservatives of yesteryear would have had, but this "we" thing … "WE'VE got to have this policy! WE'RE getting these guys!" You hear it on CNN and FoxNews, "What should WE do?" It's not "we," it's a small group of sociopaths.