[Below is an interview we sent Patrick Buchanan at his web site "The American Cause." He never replied. His web page is still complaining about jobs "stolen" by NAFTA, the trade treaty amongst Canada, Mexico and the United $tates. Prior to September 11th, there was supposedly an "isolationist" wing of the Republican Party ruling the United $tates that did not want to be involved in a "system of alliances" abroad and various war and "peace-keeping" actions. Former Republican Patrick Buchanan attempted to push this wing into a separate camp from Republican bourgeois internationalists by going to the Reform Party to run for president. Buchanan apparently failed, but we now find that he did not really believe in his ideas about opposing "empire" anyway. We remind readers that there was another politician who claimed to be only interested in his own country without eliminating the capitalist system--Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, we can see that Buchanan cannot be taken seriously with his rhetoric about not wanting conquest or empire.]

Request to interview Patrick Buchanan

We are a communist organization called the Maoist Internationalist Movement opposed to the war in Afghanistan. We have a newspaper and a website with circulations in the 5 digits. We guarantee to run this interview verbatim up to 10,000 characters. We are interested in seeing what (if any) common grounds we have. We believe there are some. Thank you. We have these questions for Patrick Buchanan. 1. Is it not true that the United States is involved in a war right now because of its system of alliances and empire qualities? Can you say for sure that September 11th would have happened without U.S. action regarding Israel and oil in the Middle East in general? 2. Is not empire detrimental to freedoms? Is not this war causing a decrease in freedom? 3. Can you really be opposed to "empire" without opposing this war? What do you have to say about all the deals being made regarding the nature of the government in Afghanistan? 4. With regard to solutions, it was the CIA that trained and armed Osama bin Laden. Do you think that expanding the CIA and having it deal with more "unsavoury" characters as Rumsfeld says is really the solution? Should we not conclude exactly the opposite as a point of logic? Is not the expansion of the CIA the surefire way to increase violent enemies abroad? 5. You may have heard about the over 400 arrests in the Chunnel December 26th. On the night of Christmas, refugees mostly from Iraq, Somali and Afghanistan tried to enter England. What they had in common--coming from countries that were bombed by the U.S. empire. How can you propose a crackdown on immigration when the empire is bombing other countries? Don't you have to oppose the empire first?