I’m not suprised because Buchanan says essentially the same thing in his March 19 column titled “A Time for Unity” at www.theamericancause.org. His position reflects the fact that, at heart, he is a patriot, pure and simple. I think the war is a bad idea and I completely agree with him that the time for debate is over. Our duty now is to pray and hope for a swift victory for the coalition troops with as little death and destruction as possible.

May God bless America and protect all coalition troops.

I agree 100% with Adam. Buchanan’s essay is at the link

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=31598

A man who second guesses America’s entry into WWII fifty years after our victory in that war is not someone who swings with the wind.

Buchanan made an identical statement on the same show before the first Gulf War. He made it plain that when American soldiers are in combat, we support them all the way.

But, assuming the e-mail was correct, Buchanan didn’t simply utter the empty cliché that he “supports the troops,” but, contradicting everything he’s been saying for the last year, said that the U.S. war on Iraq may turn out to be a “just” war after all.

Just to add to Adam’s comments, if you look at Pat Buchanan’s column “A Time for Unity” in its entirety here:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/pb20030319.shtml

He adds these comments which seem to be an about face, from his earlier ones:

“The war debate has been protracted and bitter. Now it is over, and patriotism commands that when American soldiers face death in battle, the American people unite behind them.

(…) Today’s imperative is that the United States win this war we are in with as little bloodshed as is consistent with swift and certain victory, and make good on our commitment to liberate the Iraqis.”

Bob, you didn’t seem to notice the rest of Buchanan’s comments— he’s see picking at Bush at a time when that isn’t right: (from the same article)

“The question arises: Why were we and the Brits so isolated diplomatically and militarily as we went to war to rid the world of the beast of Baghdad?

“America led the world to victory in the Cold War. We remain the world’s lone superpower, dominant in ways the British empire never was. But as war loomed, we no longer led the world, for the world refused to follow. In Asia, Europe and Latin American, tens of millions now see us as a rogue superpower. Why?

“The New World Order of George H.W. Bush’s vision, where the United States would work through the United Nations to police the world, as free trade spread and democratization deepened, can now never be realized by his son. “

He sounds like an extreme liberal— “tens of millions see us as a rogue superpower, why?” That’s about what that WA St Senator asked a group of school kids— “what have we done to bring this on ourselves?” I’ve had enough of this America-blaming. If you say you’re going to support Bush, do it 100% and don’t harp on what’s a done decision, especially at a time of war.

Buchanan says that now is the time to put aside differences and back the war, back U.S. success in the war, back Bush in prosecuting the war. But on the very next page after Buchanan’s article is a piece by the vicious anti-American Eric Margolis attacking Bush and the war policy in the usual terms we’ve come to expect from Margolis and TAC.

So Buchanan wants to have it both ways. In time of war, it becomes required, if one is to maintain any legitimacy at all, to support your country. But if you really DON’T support your country, then this is just an act causing a fair amount of nervous strain. We see liberals going through this dance all the time. They go through the motions of supporting America, but their true hostility against America keeps popping out.

Since Buchanan has become like left-liberals in other respects, it should be no surprise that he would become like them in this respect as well.

For an angle on this liberal bad faith, see my article at FrontPage magazine, The Hilarious Dilemma of Liberal Patriotism.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=2922

“How does a patriotic conservative behave when he believes his country has made a mistake by entering a war?”

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/HardRight/HardRight032503.html

Hearing Fleming call himself a patriotic American would be like hearing Noam Chomsky call himself one. I direct readers to my article “Thomas Fleming on the 9/11 Attack,” http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001261.html, which contains quotes of him, among other things, expressing mocking contempt toward the anguish Americans expressed over 9/11.

After a certain amount of evidence is in, certain assertions cease to be sustainable and should stop being entertained. One such dead assertion is the idea that Thomas Fleming is patriotic. The man may have certain virtues, much as, say, Mencken must have had certain virtues. But patriotism—except for patriotism toward his beloved ancestral land of Serbia—cannot reasonably be said to be one of them.

If you mean Fleming is Not an unthinking chauvinist, I couldn’t agree more.

A question I have is why does Thomas Fleming see the need to defend Tranzis (the French) and Marxists (the Serb regime of Milosevic)? Chirac and company stand against everything Mr. Fleming theoretically wishes to preserve, and Milosevic was nothing but a mafioso who ran Serbia into the ground. While I can certainly understand the desire not to intervene in the Balkans, where there is no compelling national security interest, supporting Milosevic makes no sense. Some Paleos are certainly associating with very strange comany these days.

Here’s a theory I’ve had about Fleming for some time, back from when I used to read Chronicles. Fleming in his heart believes in white America and is inexpressibly horrified, as many of us are, by its ongoing loss. But Fleming is also philosophically opposed to the idea of the white race and doesn’t want to be associated with explicit racialists such as Jared Taylor, whom he has harshly criticized. Also, he hates contemporary, centralized, “imperial,” America so much that he can’t identify with America in any form, including the idea of white America. Thus his overly intense identification with Serbia is an indirect, “safe,” way of expressing his deeper but unacknowledged racial concerns. He needs to attach himself to SOME racial/cultural particularity, and since his regionalist ideology or his dislike of explicit racialism or his hatred of America forbids him from embracing white America per se, he directs all that energy toward the Serbs.

It’s a stupid waste of energy and talent. Instead of having Chronicles deal seriously with the real racial problem that we face in this county, he made it largely irrelevant to American concerns.

This is a variation on a theme we see over and over on the paleo right: they hate so much what the left and the mainstream conservatives have done to America that they now virtually hate America itself, and so are no longer capable or desirous of defending her.

In Death of the West I remember a passage suggestive of the view that a “Second Desert Storm” would be a sign of Western vitality…