Hawks we are, hawks we must remain

And so we rallied to the side of President Bush, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement in the years that followed. Alas, the decade began feeling like the ’40s but eventually seemed more like the ’60s: polarized, uncivil, and uncertain. We knew who was to blame.

But while our liberal Democratic adversaries remain our natural adversaries and thus painless to oppose, our libertarian cousins—supportive of the free market, sure, but viciously anti-war—are much more difficult to deal with. And so to those of us who earned our political stripes and scars during the first decade of this century particularly because of the events that followed September 2001, I pose these questions:

Do we want the American right (along with the entire nation) to forever remember 9/11 as a call to arms for the Good War of a new century, or should we forever regard it as a sad precursor to a national blunder abroad over which we hang our heads in shame?

Will we retell the story of Operation: Iraqi Freedom as one of courage and liberation, or will we opt to let Fahrenheit 9/11 do the talking?

And as the war in Afghanistan continues to be waged and its toll continues to rise, will we demand that America must win and that the bad guys must lose no matter what, or will we quietly tip toe away from the fight if it becomes a political liability and look the other way if our troops come home in defeat?

On every one of these questions, self-proclaimed conservatives of every age and background must choose the former. There are no two ways about it. Regrettably, I fear that most of the libertarians who cast their ballots for Ron Paul at CPAC would instinctively trend toward the latter.

To be sure, when I say “libertarian,” I don’t mean pro-free enterprise, pro-limited government conservatives. If I did, I’d be referring to half the country let alone every single Republican I know. Rather, I’m talking about capital-L “Libertarians”—the anti-government, anti-war, “we provoked 9/11,” “Lincoln was a tyrant,” conspiracy-minded squad of ideologues who’ve gotten louder, prouder, and increasingly self-righteous and more numerous over the past several years. Despite whatever similarities we might share with them (and some certainly do exist), we conservatives are still our own separate species.

A popular adage among conservatives in Washington is to “always add and multiply, never subtract and divide.” But when some differences are so severe that fundamental disagreements cannot be overcome, definitive distinctions need to be drawn. Can those who openly profess that Iran should be able to possess nuclear weapons really stand for very long on the same ship as those who squarely reject such an asinine notion? Of course not.

In the months, years, and election cycles that lay ahead, certain conflicts will be unavoidable. There may well arise the temptation for some conservatives to misread the 2009 backlash against Barack Obama as purely libertarian-rooted and thus to foolishly forget about the national security plank of our movement. The enormous CPAC spotlights given to the likes of Ron Paul and Glenn Beck were indicative of this.