Distant Drums at Sarah's Party

by Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, September 05, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- The American Right has just died and gone to
heaven.

Last night's convention address by Sarah Palin here in St. Paul has
confirmed the bold decision of John McCain to choose the Alaska
governor as his co-pilot and united the Republican Party as it has
not been since the second term of Ronald Reagan.

A wild enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has brought conservatives home to
John McCain, and GOP leaders of all hues -- from Fred Thompson to
Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee to Rudy Giuliani -- to the rostrum to
lacerate the liberal media for their five days of feral assaults on
Sister Sarah.

The war the right lives for, against the people the right truly
loathes -- the liberal media elite who savagely "Bork" every true
conservative who gets on the path to national power -- has been
reignited.

Positive polarization has been achieved. The Republican Party has
been united and invigorated. The enthusiasm gap with the Democratic
ticket has been closed. And the issues upon which the base loves to
fight -- the Culture War and Right to Life -- are back on the table.

Palin's beautifully crafted and delivered acceptance speech, after
Rudy's gleeful excoriations of the pretensions of Obama, will rank
as a night to remember in convention history.

Yet, as the familiar battle lines form up for the delicious
eight-week war that lies ahead, one hears a distant thunder. And
the seriousness of the hour we are in comes home.

U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and
al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just
across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into
the biggest hornet's nest on earth?

How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S.
incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been
reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak
new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed
President Musharraf, fall?

What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its
five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America's great ally in
South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?

In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as
hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with
the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a
winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what
cost?

While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early
return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki
regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle
accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over
who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.

Is the end of America's long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an
Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?

Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil
Saakashvili's army with weapons and training prior to his invasion
of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly
strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and
considering new military aid to Syria.

Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated
Iran's nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the
Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.

Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new
aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid
is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S.
warships.

In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking
of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has
demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine -- a sphere
from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be
excluded.

This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to
bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, "We
are all Georgians now!" -- but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly
willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Joseph
Stalin's birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who
launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost
within 24 hours?

In June of 1914, a powerful flotilla of the Royal Navy was anchored
in the German port of Kiel on a friendly visit where British naval
officers visited German warships on the invitation of Adm. Von
Tirpitz, and the Kaiser himself inspected the great new British
battleship George V, in the uniform of a British admiral.

The festive occasion was interrupted and ended by news of the
assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand in
Sarajevo in the Balkans, where neither British nor Germans had
vital interests.

Six weeks later, the two nations had plunged into the bloodiest war
in history. Today, as Republicans celebrate the last hours of a
hugely successful convention, and Democrats seethe at the hiding
they took, are we as a nation drifting inexorably for new
confrontations and larger and wider wars?