IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ
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White House has become "a virtual fortress" due to the anthrax scare.
If
the
u.s.
economy were not dependent on imports to maintain production,
then America would not have to worry about the West Coast shipper
strike. Open borders and free immigration have made the nation vulnera–
ble to terrorists and illegal aliens. The folly is compounded in the wars of
intervention from Panama to Haiti to Somalia to Kuwait to Bosnia to
Kosovo. Buchanan views the World Trade Center as a "blowback"-by
which he obviously means a payback. America is left with a single ally:
Sharon's Israel. "The occupation of the West Bank" is a finishing touch.
Washington and Jerusalem become the vortex to which Congress has
capitulated, and thus it shares the blame with President Bush.
The world of Pat Buchanan is one that has been turned upside down.
Cause and effect are reversed, for the enemy is to be found within. Amer–
ican efforts to enforce a plethora of resolutions to prevent nuclear prolif–
eration in the Middle East become little more than naked displays of
American imperialism. Near-complete Palestinian intransigence to any
sort of peaceful solution that recognizes the sovereignty of a Jewish State
is understood as a response to an Israeli warrior instinct. American efforts
to guard the vital shipping lanes of the world become examples of how
we violate our own capacities to build a self-contained economy. A day
will come, we are ominously informed, in which "we will settle accounts
with those who sacrificed God's Country on their pagan altar of empire."
If
Buchanan puts forward an oversimplified model of the universe, it
nonetheless makes for compelling rhetoric.
It
identifies an easy enemy:
the imperial president, whose view of the world corrupts "God's Coun–
try" by trying to tell other people how to live. As a bonus, Buchanan's
model provides a scenario for the paranoid class, a universe of Jewish
manipulators in Israel and the United States angling to take command of
the levers of economic power, while new barons of the Southwest con–
trol the political process. Add to this a dose of conspiracy theory, namely
that the electoral process itself is being sacrificed and debased by new
military adventures that direct American attention away from economic
problems at home to Pyrrhic adventures overseas, and the political–
ideological syllogism within which Buchanan works becomes complete.
It
is a superficially appealing universe in which a virtuous America is
beset on all sides by a corrupt world, extending from Europe and Asia
to the Middle East. Buchanan's premise is an America that is self–
sustainable and resistant to the blandishments or the cares of the world.
For Buchanan, the deeper we proceed into the first decade of the new
century the more evident it becomes that the issue is not terrorism, but
the presumption that such acts of terror are brought about by the
