Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 22 2005 (IPS) — One of the most misleading U.S. journalistic conventions has been the use of “conservative” to describe right-wing Republicans, like President George W. Bush and the party’s leadership in Congress. More than four years into the “war on terrorism”, it is clear to all but the blindest observers that they are anything but.

That their foreign policy views were essentially radical in nature was evident virtually from the moment that Bush took office. Within weeks, his administration made clear it had no interest in participating in multilateral efforts to combat global warming or promote disarmament.

Or very little interest, for that matter, in preserving the multilateral order that the United States helped promote for the previous half century – even at the risk of alienating its closest European allies.

Whatever constraints on that unilateralist vision persisted during the first nine months of Bush’s tenure dissolved with the “war on terror”, as administration hawks – a coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives, and the Christian Right – dispensed altogether with the realist/liberal-internationalist consensus of the previous 50 years in a bid to create a “unipolar world”.

In this new scenario, the U.S. would make the rules, enforce them with overwhelming military power, and ignore them when they got in the way. That concept of world order – most dramatically illustrated by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq – provoked an early rebellion within “conservative” ranks.

“Paleo-conservatives” and some libertarians were the first to desert the administration, charging that policies needed to maintain an empire of the kind implied by Bush’s vision – among them, a huge military build-up and expeditionary forces to be sent hither and yon at a moment’s notice – were incompatible with “small r” republican values and institutions.

“A Republic, Not an Empire” was the title of paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan’s book-length critique of the administration’s policies.

Conservative “realists” of the kind that dominated the George H.W. Bush administration (1989-1993) also expressed strong reservations, although, reluctant to burn their bridges to the younger Bush, they did not go into open revolt.

In spite of Washington’s dominant military power, they argued, the administration’s unipolar ambitions risked “imperial overstretch” through overseas commitments far beyond the ability of the U.S. economy and political culture to sustain without support from other nations.

They also threatened the existing global order and the institutions that underpinned it – including, for example, the North American Treaty Organisation (NATO) – of which Washington was both the principal creator and beneficiary. Why would “conservatives” want to do that?

In addition, the administration’s insistence that exporting democracy abroad was the top priority of U.S. foreign policy and that democratic governance could thrive in any country at any time appeared to these critics not only dangerous, but also utopian. This is virtually the antithesis of conservative thinking, which has traditionally focused on the importance of culture and history in shaping the political development of other countries.

These “realist” views were widely shared as well by national security bureaucrats, who, as “bureaucrats”, also tend to be “conservative” by nature and who are also sworn to uphold the Constitution – that most conservative of U.S. governing documents.

Unable to voice their views publicly for fear of retaliation by an administration that has proven vindictive as well as radical and stubborn, these professionals from the foreign service, the intelligence services and the uniformed military – most of them traditional Republicans – have communicated primarily through their retired senior officers.

They include former commander of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. Anthony Zinni, former National Security Agency (NSA) director, Gen. William Odom, and an ever-growing cascade of leaks.

While all of these conservative dissidents – paleos, libertarians, realists and government bureaucrats – have been proven largely correct in their worries about the administration’s foreign policy radicalism, the relative indifference of most of the public to world affairs, let alone contending foreign policy philosophies, has limited their political impact.

Indeed, so long as the impact of Bush’s foreign policy was seen as something that took place overseas rather than at home, Republican voters, who, in any case, generally tend to be somewhat more parochial and less well-educated than Democrats and independents, were inclined to defer to the party’s leaders. These are, most prominently, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the hard-line Republican Congressional leadership – whose access to the mass media was, in any event, far greater than that of “conservative” dissidents.

In recent weeks that appears to have changed, as the domestic ramifications – apart from the red ink caused by the increasing costs of the “war on terror” – of Bush’s foreign policy vision have become clearer.

In particular, the revelation that the administration secretly ordered the NSA to monitor communications between and among some U.S. citizens and people overseas without obtaining warrants from a special court established by Congress in the late 1970s has sparked a major crisis among Republicans.

Worse, Bush’s and Cheney’s public defence of their actions and their assertion that the president has virtually unlimited powers as commander-in-chief in time of war, which permit him to effectively overrule or ignore laws passed by Congress, have caused serious consternation among “conservative” lawmakers who until recently have reliably toed the administration’s line.

The administration’s position on the president’s war-time powers essentially parallels that of its “unipolar world”. Under this view, a war-time president can make the laws, enforce them, and ignore them when they get in the way. It represents a clear challenge to the system of the “checks and balances” that govern relations between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government that are at the conservative heart of the U.S. constitution.

Bruce Fein, a prominent Republican commentator and senior Justice Department official under former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, charged during an interview Thursday that Bush is claiming “more power than King George at the time of the (American) Revolution”.

“President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law,” he also wrote this week in The Washington Times.

Meanwhile, a conservative Washington Post columnist, Anne Applebaum, similarly noted that the “rule of law is more fundamental to our national success than democracy or freedom, since without it, neither could exist. You can’t have democracy if the president, once elected, can change the rules.”

“It seems to me that if you’re the president, you have to proceed with great caution when you do anything that flies in the face of the Constitution,” former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman, who has served on top intelligence advisory boards, told the Wall Street Journal. He called the NSA’s surveillance a “matter of grave concern”.

Rudman’s successor in the Senate, Republican John Sununu, whose father was White House chief of staff under the elder Bush, also took up the issue during the bitter debate this week when he and three other “conservative” Republicans joined Democrats in frustrating the multi-year extension of the USA Patriot Act as urged by Bush.

Quoting the quintessential pre-Revolutionary War conservative, Benjamin Franklin, Sununu warned that “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, has promised hearings on the scandal early next year. Whether these will mushroom into a broader inquiry into the administration’s sweeping views of executive power – and how it has acted on them – remains to be seen, but the radical nature of those views should now persuade journalists, at least, to reconsider their terminology.