Correspondence
Correspondence DO YOUR DUTY I ENJOYED DAVID GELERNTER'S "Bush's Rhetoric Deficit," (Oct. 6) but feel he ignored the reasons behind the American intervention in Iraq. The United States invaded Iraq...
...Today's liberals, along with those neoconservatives who applaud Kristol's formulation of the movement of which they are a part, seek to use the state to achieve what they see as desirable social ends...
...One cannot have both big (and growing) government and personal liberty...
...That was a happy collateral benefit of our actions, not the necessary or sufficient reason for our actions...
...betrays a flawed historical analysis...
...One grows at the expense of the other...
...Kristol's version of conservatism represents not so much a new philosophical system as an abject surrender to the dominance of the state in human affairs...
...This is especially true since Kristol formerly had expressed reservations about the growing power of government...
...But it is wrong to suppose we deserve praise for ending the torture in Iraq...
...But "traditional" conservatives have always understood the true nature of government and the will to power that beats at its core...
...but the traditional conservatives Kristol dismisses as antediluvian dinosaurs will remain committed to the inseparable link between limited government and the dignity of the free individual...
...25) profoundly disturbing...
...For instance, pushing for rapid political change within the People's Republic of China is the natural position to take with respect to supporting global freedom and democracy, but such a sudden change within the PRC could destabilize the international economy and disrupt the modest economic recovery currently underway here in America...
...Thus, Benjamin Franklin warned his fellow Founders that people do indeed tend to prefer security over liberty, which led the men who gathered to craft our Constitution to write in checks and balances designed specifically to protect the limited government they all favored...
...It is axiomatic that as the power of government grows, the liberty of the individual must necessarily recede...
...It was precisely such thinking, and the dangers attendant to it, against which Hayek so elegantly warned...
...He celebrates the neoconservative embrace of big government and the welfare state, sneers at the work of Russell Kirk, and dismisses the concerns of those who, like us, look skeptically at the continuing growth of government as essentially irrelevant...
...STEVE ASPENSON Minneapolis, MN DAVID GELERNTER'S "Bush's Rhetoric Deficit" provides an interesting perspective on the role of morality in foreign policy, but it also raises some difficult issues...
...It was Hayek's The Road to Serfdom that led Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to embrace conservatism...
...Kristol's triumphalist tone—crowing, in effect, "We're all big government conservatives, now...
...The soldiers, many of them, did their duty...
...But most conservative analysts have found this desire something to be feared rather than celebrated...
...But it was nice to have him as a fellow conservative, if only for a time...
...True conservatives always have viewed government with a profound skepticism and sought to limit its reach, whereas the neocon impulse seems to be the same as that which animates liberalism...
...It was also the seminal work that inspired resistance in both the West and the East to the seemingly inexorable march of Marxism and collectivist big government that characterized the years immediately following World War II...
...The United States invaded Iraq in order to stop a rogue nation with weapons of mass destruction...
...Both are utopian...
...DAVID A. KEENE American Conservative Union Alexandria, VA...
...Any analysis that places Franklin Roosevelt within the conservative tradition while dismissing Barry Goldwater is at best deeply suspect...
...Kristol sniffs at the "Hayekian notion" that we are on "the road to serfdom...
...The observation that people prefer strong government, or at least those things that such governments promise to deliver, is hardly novel...
...Our motivation was self-interested and we should not pretend it was duty...
...They deserve moral praise for it...
...This may not worry today's big-government neocons, who seem far more interested in the pursuit, acquisition, and exercise of government power than in the freedom these impulses threaten...
...After all, he writes, "People have always preferred strong government to weak...
...Irving Kristol and his fellow neocons may be comfortable with the welfare state...
...JOSEPH WILLIAMS Lexington, KY NEOCONTEST AS "TRADITIONAL" conservative believers in individual liberty and a less intrusive government, we found Irving Kristol's "The Neoconservative Persuasion" (Aug...
...The most obvious problem involves choosing the direction of America's policy in situations where doing what is morally right conflicts with what is in America's interest...
Vol. 9 • October 2003 • No. 6
