As many people know, I have spent most of my waking hours reading – books, newspapers, magazines – for work and pleasure since probably my early teens.
Two of my favorite nationally syndicated columnists are now deceased: Charley Reese died in 2013 and Georgie Anne Geyer in 2019. Both became columnists after long careers as newspaper reporters.
Both would have loved President Trump’s recent speech in Riyadh in which he attacked neocons, nation builders and interventionists.
Both wrote words in the early 2000s about our policies in Israel, Palestine and Iraq that are just as applicable today as they were then.
Charley Reese was chosen as the most popular columnist in a vote by many thousands who responded to a poll by C-SPAN in 1999. He wrote in a very plain, down-to-earth way.
In 2002, a few months before we went to war in Iraq, but when it was already the main topic of debate, Reese wrote: “The truth is this: The terrorist attacks against the United States are a direct result of our one-sided support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. That’s it, pure and simple.”
He added: “The big pushers for war with Iraq are the usual suspects – Americans with a long record of pretending to speak about America’s interests when in fact they are pushing an Israeli agenda.” Now, you can replace the word “Iraq” with the word “Iran.”
On Jan. 24, 2005, Reese wrote, “Propaganda aside, our actions have created the almost universal hostility toward the United States in the Arab world. Our actions have been to support Israel 100 percent while it kills and brutalizes the Palestinians and refuses to negotiate with them.”
Georgie Anne Geyer wrote a few months after the war started in 2003 that “critics of the war against Iraq have said since the beginning of the conflict that Americans, still strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged by a minority in their name, will inevitably come to a point where they will see they have to have a government that provides services at home, or one that seeks empire across the globe.”
These words are still true today. Only the names have been changed so that millions more innocents can be brutalized and the U.S. can go many trillions – yes, trillions – more into debt.
When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he went all over the country speaking out against nation building (of other nations) and saying that we needed a “more humble” foreign policy. But then he appointed neocons to run his administration and went in an exactly opposite direction.
Columnist George Will once wrote that neocons were “magnificently misnamed” and that they were “really the most radical people in this city” (meaning Washington).
President Trump made some neocon-type appointments during his first term that he later regretted. But I was ecstatic when I heard what he said in Riyadh on May 14: “But in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
“No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called ‘nation builders,’ neocons or liberal non-profits, like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, and so many other cities.”
He added: “The birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves…” and “has not come from western interventionists … giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.”
Long before this speech, on April 16, 2016, I was invited with five other members of Congress to meet Mr. Trump at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and hear his first major speech on foreign policy.
He said that day that “our resources are totally overextended … we’re rebuilding other countries while weakening our own.” He said he had been “totally against” the war in Iraq and said that “No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first.”
Tom Friedman, the longtime and very pro-Israel columnist for the New York Times, wrote on May 9th that “Netanyahu is not our friend,” and added: “On the Middle East, you have some good independent instincts, Mr. President. Follow them.”
With Netanyahu, neocons and Christian Zionists now pushing for war against Iran, I wish they would read the words of the late Republican leader, Sen. Robert Taft, who was featured in John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles In Courage.”
“No foreign policy can be justified except a policy devoted without reservation or diversion to the protection of liberty of the American people, with war only as the last resort and only to preserve that liberty.”
Reprinted with author’s permission from the Knoxville Focus.
