A Studied Contrarian Fights the Washington War Machine

War Hawk Sens. Rubio, Graham, McCain and Kirk celebrate “victory” in Libya after the death of Ghadafi.

In a post this morning, Robert W. Merry, editor of The American Conservative, discusses the well known contrarian and enthusiastically anti-war writer, David Stockman. Merry highlights Stockman’s support for President Trump’s refusal to play nice with Washington’s pro-war faction. Merry writes:

Stockman’s latest passion should stir interest. He has emerged as a vociferous and pugilistic critic of what he calls “the Washington War Party.” He distilled his realist foreign policy outlook in a recent piece for Antiwar.com entitled “The Tweet That Is Shaking the War Party.’’ The tweet in question was President Trump’s in conjunction with his decision to terminate U.S. support for rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The president called that support “massive, dangerous, and wasteful.’’

Stockman praised this characterization and said the president’s words demonstrate that he occasionally, despite his usual “street brawling” temperament, “slices through Imperial Washington’s sanctimonious cant.’’ He added, “No stouter blow to the neocon/Deep State ‘regime change’ folly has ever been issued by an elected public official.”

From there Stockman issued an attack on the man he calls “Senator McWar of Arizona,’’ otherwise known as John McCain, who denounced the president’s action as “playing right into the hands of Vladimir Putin.” Writes Stockman: “That’s just plain pathetic because the issue is the gross stupidity and massive harm that has been done by McCain’s personally inspired and directed war on Assad—not Putin and not Russia’s historic role as an ally of the Syrian regime.”