From what I've seen, your wondering comes from erroneously associating support for the invasion of Iraq as the litmus test for things Republican and things conservative. Don't forget that there are other elements of conservatism. I find company with the earlier generation of conservatives like
Milton Friedman, William Buckley jr. - people from before the liberal
entryists (the neocons) came to have so much influence.
You'll have to remember that I joined when we were the party of Reagan and in favor of small government. Now the party has come to be dominated by
"big-government conservatives" (as if there could actually be such a thing. That's about as sensible as dehydrated water.) In those days we had Realist foreign policy in the line of Kissinger, Scowcroft and Baker where America's vital interest took precedence over idealistic visions of ivory tower academics who want to use America's military to conduct dicey social engineering experiments on the other side of (and possibly all around) the globe.
Have you ever even heard of the
Sharon Statement? It's a brief document, but I'll not republish it in its entirety that there may be some joy of discovery left for those who have not.
Here're some excerpts:
That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;
That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;
That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?
As I noted
here, the electorate must keep its watchful eyes not only on foreign enemies, but on the more insidious internal enemies that are not even human but rather human frailties like the tendency to trust those in power forgetting that they are, after all, politicians, and blind forces such as those that make us likely to consider
rational ignorance an option.
The electorate must actively preserve and acquire all necessary tools to find skullduggery and the appearances of skullduggery. When used properly, these limit the damage potential of hugger mugger scoundrels and reprobates in positions of public trust. The electorate must also actively preserve and acquire all necessary tools to end and correct such perfidy as it is discovered.
As Gee Dubya the First's s'posed t'said, "
[government] is a dangerous servant".
If others want to embrace big-government philosophies, substitute cheering and jeering for rational debate (thereby surrendering our hard won freedoms to the whims of whatever politicians have the best slogans), and trade the lives of our men and women in the armed forces in pursuit of idealistic flights of fancy rather than the just interests of the United States and call this conservatism, I, unfortunately, cannot stop them. But it doesn't mean that I have to follow after them and use their newspeak calling these things conservatism or calling what is conservatism something else.
