On Neocons and Neurotics: Yaron Brook and the Folly of Preemption

Yaron Brook
Though America is undoubtedly more politically polarized than ever, the view that the War in Iraq was a fiasco is something that almost everyone outside of think tanks or the military industrial complex can agree on. For those familiar with the works of paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried, the idea that the war was a gross waste of American lives and treasure is a recurring theme. That many neocons remain unrepentant (and unaccountable) is not surprising. What may perhaps surprise the reader is that there are some intellectuals who believe the problem with our intervention is that we didn’t go far enough.
Yaron Brook is an Israeli-American who writes for The Objective Standard, a kind of Randian objectivist/rational egoist outlet that makes Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard look reasonable. In “‘Just War Theory’ versus American Self-Defense” Brook wastes no time in getting to the heart of the matter when he informs the audience (the piece is adapted from a talk) that in order for the US to win decisively in the Middle East it would have been necessary to “inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations” deliberately.
His models for what should have been done in Iraq include the Allied attacks on Japanese and German cities, which he acknowledges killed “hundreds of thousands.” Brook even approvingly quotes Winston Churchill, who wrote “the severe ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort…but will create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.”
Apparently, the threat of what Brook calls “Islamic Totalitarianism” is to be dealt with in the same way as “the Nazi and Japanese imperialist threats,” which were in no small part resolved by “America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.” Read more