Unpatriotic Conservatives: A war against America

-- llewellyn h. rockwell, "the end of buckleyism," in spintech, june 12, 1999

In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraq plus Kuwait and prospectively Saudi Arabia would possess the world's biggest reservoir of oil. With this vast new oil wealth, Saddam could at last acquire the nuclear weapons he coveted -- and thus dominate the entire Middle East. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that the conquest of Kuwait "will not stand" and assembled a global coalition against Saddam. The paleoconservative repudiation of the Gulf War would be their first major independent ideological adventure.

Three weeks after the invasion, Pat Buchanan declared his opposition to war in one of his regular appearances on The McLaughlin Group: "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

It would be hard to come up with a more improbable idea than that of George H. W. Bush of Kennebunkport as warmaking servant of the interests of International Jewry. Yet over the next six months, Buchanan and the Chronicles writers would repeatedly argue that America was being dragged to war in the Gulf by a neoconservative coterie indifferent to true American interests: the "neoconservatives," as Buchanan said, "the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-Communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent."

Early in 1990, Buchanan published an article in The National Interest (a journal founded, ironically enough, by Irving Kristol, who sometimes seemed to be the only person in America willing to accept the "neoconservative" label), in which Buchanan called for a new foreign policy of "America First." And "America First" would be the slogan of Buchanan's presidential run in 1992: more irony, because by 1992 the paleos were frankly disgusted, not merely with the rest of the conservative movement and the Republican party, but with much of America. "Last month," Buchanan wrote in 1991, "during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it."

Fed up as they were with the Second America, however, the paleos felt sure that they spoke for the First America with an integrity the traditional conservatives, let alone the neos, never had. Francis in particular scolded National Review's conservatives for their isolation from America's "grassroots." He chose an interesting means of illustrating his point: "Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism)." No wonder then that these fringe characters were able to achieve nothing more impressive than the election of Ronald Reagan and victory in the Cold War.