Pat Buchanan Gets It Right Again

Today, Pat Buchanan has published another fine editorial piece on HUMAN EVENTS that gets it right again, reflecting on the failed Bush presidency.. Pat Buchanan is one conservative I really like because he often gets it exactly right. An "Unreflective Man" is a fine analysis of the grossly failed Bush presidency.

Buchanan rightly pointed out the supposed success of "the surge" was merely nothing more than a formula used by "empires for centuries" to buy off the Sunni tribes by paying 80,000 militia members a monthly salary to hunt down Al Qaeda, as well as an Iraqi public anger against Al Qaeda motivated by revenge for murders of Iraqi citizens, as well as a huge new infusion of 30,000 more American troops. That strategy was hardly novel or new, but merely a well proven military formula that could be traced back to battle successes of ancient feudal empires and others who hired mercenary tribes to fight their battles for them.

And Buchanan rightly pointed out that Mr. Bush's so-called Freedom Agenda for Iraq has only resulted in over 4,000 Americans killed, another 30,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, many more wounded, and millions of refugees. Buchanan notes that Mr. Bush seems to be unaware of this high human cost merely to remove one dictator's control of Iraq because Mr. Bush had a long running personal grudge against Saddam Hussein and somehow felt compelled to complete the job that his father failed to do by removing him during the first 1991 Gulf War to begin with. The end result was essentially father and son following a degree of success with a huge measure of failure.

Buchanan also seems to rightly note that Mr. Bush seems so self-absorbed in his own sense of the nobility of his own ideals of "freedom" towards Iraq, and that somehow this own internal self-justifying thinking by Bush will somehow validate any human cost incurred towards those goals. Buchanan views this as the same sort of self-delusional thinking that once pervaded Woodrow Wilson.

But Buchanan is also quick to note that in the area of economics is yet another area where Bush never seemed to get where he was causing the economic destruction of the U.S. even before the current deep recession crisis. Bush was so opposed to what he called protectionism, that he allowed 3 million American manufacturing jobs to slip away to labor cheap nations such as China, and made our nation largely dependent on the banks of Asia to prop up the bankrupt economics of George Bush.

And Mr. Buchanan also expresses very serious concerns over the growing humanitarian crisis building in Gaza where Palestinian casualties are outnumbering Israeli casualties by 100 to 1. With the Hamas strategy of using schoolchildren and women as "human shields" to mask their cowardly attacks on Israelis, Israel's military is causing greast "collateral damage" to the Palestinian civilians that will leave their society in great poverty and social destruction for perhaps up to decades.

And Mr. Buchanan rightly noted that as bad as some enemies of the U.S. might be, that the American government needs to maintain a dialogue with this persons, especially if they have nuclear weapons.

I might continue to cringe at many of the notions about immigration that Mr. Buchanan seems to hold very close to his heart. But darn, the guy is near dead on right often in his analysis of many other matters. And today's piece by Buchanan in HUMAN EVENTS, "An Unreflective Man" was pretty well dead-on right in so many respects of why the Bush presidency was such a text book case of failure.

As much as I'm a standard bearer for the liberal ideology, there's a few conservatives like Pat Buchanan that I really like because they understand how things really work, unlike the conservatism of George Bush that was so-self absorbed in self-love for his own ideals where he could just never recognize the massive short comings and end results building from the technical failures of these ideals in the real details. Indeed the Devil is often in the details. Mr. Obama might just be wise to consider adding Pat Buchanan in some way to his pool of advisors to add a diverse opinion to his administration.