It's interesting to see a staunch conservative like Pat Buchanan so consistently critical of John McCain:

  • ONWARD THE REVOLUTION! [McCain's short-sighted foreign policy]



    "For decades in the Middle East we had a strategy of relying upon autocrats to provide order and stability. We relied on the Shah, the autocratic rulers of Egypt, the generals of Pakistan, the Saudi royal family. ... We can no longer delude ourselves that relying on these outdated autocrats is the safest bet."

    Speaking of self-delusion, does McCain believe the "democrats" lately elected in Pakistan will be tougher on al-Qaida and the Taliban than Pervez Musharraf, who has twice escaped assassination for having sided with us?

    Does McCain think this new crowd in Islamabad will be more pro-American than the general, when the people who voted them in are among the most anti-American in the Islamic world?

    From Richard Nixon to George Bush I, we expelled Moscow from Egypt, won the Cold War, brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and created a worldwide alliance, including Hafez al-Assad of Syria, that drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait.

    What has the Bush-McCain democracy crusade produced, save electoral victories for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah and Hamas? And if we dump the sultan of Oman, President Mubarak, and the king of Saudi Arabia, who does McCain think will replace them?


    McCain proposes a "League of Democracies" to unite a hundred nations for peace and freedom. "Revanchist Russia," however, is to be black-balled from McCain's league and thrown out of the G-8.

    What would this accomplish other than undoing the work of Reagan in bringing Moscow in from the cold, driving Russia into the arms of China, restarting the Cold War and recreating the Beijing-Moscow axis it was Nixon's great achievement to break up?

    Does our "realistic idealist" think a NATO of 25 nations that has mustered a piddling 16,000 soldiers, most of them noncombatants, to stand beside us in Afghanistan is going to confront a nuclear-armed Russia?

    What is critical, especially in wartime, is not whether a regime is autocratic or democratic, but whether it is hostile or friendly.



Although it's difficult to see Buchanan having any favorable opinion of the pacifict liberal tendencies of either Obama or Hillary either (to say nothing of their immigration policy).