Unpatriotic Conservatives

My reason for wanting to avoid war, shifting to containment rather than deterrence, is that it is strategically the only sensible move. We cannot fight a war with Russia from our present position without losing it and/or escalating into truly disastrous territory. 

However, there are others who are opposed to fighting the war for other reasons. Rod Dreher at The American Conservative writes on this today. He begins by reminding us that "Unpatriotic Conservatives" was also a line used to oppose those, like Pat Buchanan, who opposed the Iraq war. [There is a lot of cursing in this post, which normally we don't do at the Hall, but it's an emotional moment and topic.]

[T]he world is full of evil bastards, not all of whom can or should be fought by American soldiers. War is a great clarifier. As I type this, I’m thinking of the gentle kid from my summer baseball league in the 1970s, who grew up to be sent to Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard, and who came home traumatized and unable to set foot inside his family’s church, because he said God could never forgive him for what he did over there. To my knowledge, he has never told a soul what it was (I heard about it from his anguished wife....

The people who need to hear it most are utterly incapable of listening. So I’m going to say it both to lay down a marker for the future (for when the talking heads puzzle over how things got to this disastrous point) and to encourage fellow conservatives who are thinking these thoughts, but are confused by them, because they’re new, and feel strange and even kind of dirty.

To repeat myself: I am opposed to Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I think Russia should leave Ukraine alone, but whatever happens, I am adamantly against following the US leadership into hawkish actions against the Russians. It’s not at all because I support Russia or in any way approve of what it’s doing. (I hope Russian families and Russian soldiers stop to think about what exorbitant cost is extracted from them so that Putin can restore Greater Russia.) It’s rather that I am sick to the point of puking of these people — the American elites — sh*tting all over so many of us, yet expecting us to send our sons (and daughters) to fight its damn wars. 

I would definitely not send my son to fight in a war that cannot be won. I might go myself, although Aquinas reminds us that wars are only justifiable if they have a hope of victory -- otherwise there is no potential good to balance against the certain evil that results from war. It may be, though, that Dreher and Reaboi and others he cites are correct about where our real struggles properly lie.