Why Americans Hate Foreign Policy...

[Dune]

PJ O'Rourke is a f#cking genius.  These are exerpts from an exeprt (a long one) from his new book, Peace Kills

Here is the whole exerpt

Americans hate foreign policy. Americans hate foreign policy because Americans hate foreigners. Americans hate foreigners because Americans are foreigners. We all come from foreign lands, even if we came ten thousand years ago on a land bridge across the Bering Strait. We didn’t want anything to do with those Ice Age Siberians, them with the itchy cavebear-pelt underwear and mammoth meat on their breath. We were off to the Pacific Northwest—great salmon fishing, blowout potluck dinners, a whole new life.

America is not “globally conscious” or “multicultural.” Americans didn’t come to America to be Limey Poofters, Frog-Eaters, Bucket Heads, Micks, Spicks, Sheenies, or Wogs. If we’d wanted foreign entanglements, we would have stayed home. Or—in the case of those of us who were shipped to America against our will, as slaves, exiles, or transported prisoners—we would have gone back. Events in Liberia and the type of American who lives in Paris tell us what to think of that.

Being foreigners ourselves, we Americans know what foreigners are up to with their foreign policy—their venomous convents, lying alliances, greedy agreements, and trick-or-treaties. America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is “What’s the big idea?”


Americans would like to ignore foreign policy. Our previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan. Evil is an outreach program. A solitary bad person sitting alone, harboring genocidal thoughts, and wishing he ruled the world is not a problem unless he lives next to us in the trailer park. In the big geopolitical trailer park that is the world today, he does.

the subtle tactics and complex strategies of the Great Game. America’s great game is pulling the levers on the slot machines in Las Vegas. We can’t figure out what the goal of American foreign policy is supposed to be.

The goal of American tax policy is avoiding taxes. The goal of American health policy is HMO profits. The goal of American environmental policy is to clean up the environ_ment, clearing away scruffy caribou and seals so that America’s drillers for Arctic oil don’t get trampled or slapped with a flipper. But the goal of American foreign policy is to foster international cooperation, protect Americans at home and abroad, promote world peace, eliminate human rights abuses, improve U.S. business and trade opportunities, and stop global warming.

We were going to stop global warming by signing the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions. Then we real_ized the Kyoto protocol was ridiculous and unenforceable and that no one who signed it was even trying to meet the emissions requirements except for some countries from the former Soviet Union. They accidentally quit emitting greenhouse gases because their economies collapsed. However, if we withdraw from diplomatic agreements because they’re ridiculous, we’ll have to withdraw from every diplomatic agreement, because they’re all ridiculous. This will not foster international cooperation. But if we do foster international cooperation, we won’t be able to protect Americans at home and abroad, because there has been a lot of international cooperation in killing Americans. Attacking internationals won’t promote world peace, which we can’t have anyway if we’re going to eliminate human rights abuses, because there’s no peaceful way to get rid of the governments that abuse the rights of people—people who are chained to American gym-shoe-making machinery, dying of gym shoe lung, and getting paid in shoelaces, thereby improving U.S. business and trade opportunities, which result in economic expansion that causes global warming to get worse.

In the Middle East, Bush made an attempt to let the Israelis and the Palestinians go at it until David ran out of pebbles and Goliath had been hit on the head so many times that he was voting for Likud. In Northern Ireland, Bush also tried minding his own business. And Bush quit negotiating with North Korea about its atomic weapons for the same reason that you’d quit jawing with a crazy person about the gun he was waving and call 911.

We saw the results of Clinton’s emotional, ad hoc, higgledy-piggledy foreign policy. It led to strained relations with Russia and China, increased violence in the Middle East, continued fighting in Africa and Asia, and Serbs killing Albanians. Then we saw the results of Bush’s tough, calculated, focused foreign policy—strained relations with Russia and China, increased violence in the Middle East, continued fighting in Africa and Asia, and Albanians killing Serbs. Between the first year of the Clinton administration and the first year of the Bush administration, we went from attack on the World Trade Center to World Trade Center attack.


Further changes could be made to U.S. foreign policy. For a sample of alternative ideas, we can turn to a group of randomly (even haphazardly) chosen, average (not to say dull-normal) Americans: the 2004 Democratic presidential hopefuls. By the time this is read, most of them will be forgotten. With luck, all of them will be. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to recall what ten people who offered themselves as potential leaders of the world deemed to be America’s foreign policy options.

Incessant activist Al Sharpton pleaded for “a policy of befriending and creating allies around the world.” The way Sharpton intended to make friends was by fixing the world’s toilets and sinks. “There are 1.7 billion people that need clean water,” he said, “almost three billion that need sanitation systems . . . I would train engineers . . . would export people that would help with these things.”

Ex–child mayor of Cleveland Dennis Kucinich prom_ised to establish “a cabinet-level Department of Peace.” The secretary of peace would do for international understanding what the postmaster general does for mail.

Former one-term senator and erstwhile ambassador to New Zealand Carol Moseley Braun said, “I believe women have a contribution to make . . . we are clever enough to defeat terror without destroying our own liberty . . . we can provide for long-term security by making peace everybody’s business.” Elect me because women are clever busybodies. This is the “Lucy and Ethel Get an Idea” foreign policy.

Massachusetts’s thinner, more sober senator, John Kerry, said that he voted for threatening to use force on Saddam Hussein, but that actually using force was wrong. This is what’s known, in the language of diplomacy, as bull****.

Previous almost–vice president Joe Lieberman indignantly demanded that Bush do somewhat more of what Bush already was doing: “Commit more U.S. troops,” create “an Iraqi interim authority,” and “work with the Iraqi people and the United Nations.” Perhaps Lieberman hadn’t gotten over coming this close to the office next to the oval one. Perhaps Lieberman was suffering from a delusion that he was part of the current presidential administration. But after 9/11 Americans wanted to kiss the Supreme Court. Imagine having a Democrat as commander in chief during the War Against Terrorism, with Oprah Winfrey as secretary of defense. Big hug for Mr. Taliban. Republicans are squares, but it’s the squares who know how to fly the bombers, launch the missiles, and fire the M-16s. Democrats would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks. And did Al Gore grow that beard for a while just in case the Taliban won?

Onetime governor of insignificant Vermont Howard Dean wanted a cold war on terrorism. Dean said that we’d won the Cold War without firing a shot (a statement that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam). Dean said that the reason we’d won the Cold War without firing a shot was because we were able to show the communists “a better ideal.” But what is the “better ideal” that we can show the Islamic fundamentalists? Maybe we can tell them, “Our president is a born-again. You’re religious lunatics—we’re religious lunatics. America was founded by religious lunatics! How about those Salem witch trials? Come to America and you could be Osama bin Ashcroft. You could get your own state, like Utah, run by religious lunatics. You could have an Islamic Fundamentalist Winter Olympics—the Chador Schuss.”

Since the gist of Howard Dean’s campaign platform was “It Worked in Vermont,” he really may have thought that the terrorists should take up snowboarding. On the other hand, the gist of General (very retired) Wesley Clark’s campaign platform was “It Worked in Kosovo.” Kosovo certainly taught the world a lesson. Wherever there’s suffering, injustice, and oppression, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.

The winner of South Carolina’s JFK look-alike contest, John Edwards, and the winner of Florida’s Phil Gramm look_alike contest, Phil Gramm, said that America had won the war in Iraq but was losing the peace because Iraq was so unstable. When Iraq was stable it attacked Israel in 1967 and 1973. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wanted a stable Iraq?

[NUKE]

hehe

Nice

[EN4CER]

Saw it on the CBC (Consertive Book Club) list.  Gonna have to make the purchase.

[Holden McGroin]

As a excerpt is a small piece of the whole work, can one have a whole excerpt?

[NUKE]

did you not see the link ?

[Holden McGroin]

Read what I posted aloud in a Stephen Wright voice.

[Nash]

I got it the first time.

(I rule)

[lazs2]

nash... I still don't understand how you can not like someone like PJ who still has most of his brain cells intact and is pointedly funny but be unable to contain your mirth when you read brain ded gonzo 60's boy hunter thompson?

Compared to PJ.... hunter is a fart joke.

lazs

[Otto]

O'Rourke writes a lot for Atlantic Magazine and I really enjoy his work.   I’ll always remember his line about ‘Felony Interior Decorating’ after going through one of Saddam's ‘Palaces”.

[Nash]

Originally posted by lazs2
nash... I still don't understand how you can not like someone like PJ who still has most of his brain cells intact and is pointedly funny but be unable to contain your mirth when you read brain ded gonzo 60's boy hunter thompson?

Compared to PJ.... hunter is a fart joke.

lazs

Don't get me wrong, I think he does good work. But his style is just a form of clever that doesn't connect with me. Too obvious or something.

Hunter S, while less clever, is just so over the top that it cracks me up. Dunno why. It's like the difference between a Woody Allen movie and the bathroom scene in Something About Mary.

[soda72]

I think Afghanistan has a good chance for a better future.  It's still may be to early to tell... but I found this interesting..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4003207.stm

[Sixpence]

Americans hate foreign policy. Americans hate foreign policy because Americans hate foreigners.

I hate foreign policy that causes us to send our kids off to die, not the foreigners.

[NUKE]

Originally posted by Sixpence
Americans hate foreign policy. Americans hate foreign policy because Americans hate foreigners.

I hate foreign policy that causes us to send our kids off to die, not the foreigners.

So you hated Clinton's foreign policy?

[Sixpence]

Originally posted by NUKE
So you hated Clinton's foreign policy?

what part of my post did you not understand?

[NUKE]

Originally posted by Sixpence
what part of my post did you not understand?

well, if I understand you correctly, you hate all US foreign policy that causes our "kids" to be sent off to war.

That would include WWI, WWII, Korean, Vietnam....etc.

You basically believe that no war is worth fighting.