Another VDH masterpiece:
It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.
An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush “the world’s biggest terrorist.” And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son (“Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel”).
Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that’s why he lauded her anti-Semitism: “Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media.”
…They employ half-truths and spin conspiracy theories to argue that the war was unjust, impossible to win, and hatched through the result of a brainwashing of a devious few neocons.
…In the current issue of The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson ? hitherto known as the polemicist who compared President Bush to the secessionist, pro-slavery Jefferson Davis (e.g., “The American president ? though not of the United States ? whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis”), Sen. Zell Miller to Joseph McCarthy, and the voting of the California white middle class to a “riot” ? charges that a number of pundits are responsible for what he sees as a catastrophe in Iraq, specifically Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and myself.
The chief complaint of Meyerson’s is his belief that Iraq has ruined almost everything:
“As anti-war sentiment began to mount, Hanson dismissed it. ‘We are told,’ he wrote contemptuously in February 2002, ‘an attack against Iraq will supposedly inflame the Muslim world. Toppling Saddam Hussein will cause irreparable rifts with Europeans and our moderate allies, and turn world opinion against America.’ What to Hanson was nonsense looks like pretty fair prophecy today.”
Hardly. After a surge of anti-Americanism, continental Europeans, from the Dutch to the French, are now certainly more involved in the war against terror than they were in February 2002, as are the British.
Anti-Americanism in the Arab world was at an all time high well before Iraq. In early 2002, 72 percent of the Kuwaitis, whom we saved in 1991, expressed a dislike for the United States. Two thirds in the Arab world insisted that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with September 11.
I thought that the radical Islamic world was “inflamed” on September 11, when Palestinians danced in the streets on the news, Saddam Hussein praised the murderers, and mothers starting naming their children “Osama.”
Yet Osama bin Laden’s popularity is less now than it was then as well; there is no more Hussein dynasty; and Mr. Abbas is asking for American help. We have never been as close to moderate allies as we are now ? whether we define such friends as India (where over 70 percent express admiration for America) or Japan. Elections in France, Holland, and soon in Germany do not bode well for anti-American, EU leftists.
Yes, the long corrupt and murderous Middle East is aflame. But that is precisely because after Iraq, the Syrians have left Lebanon, the Egyptians are convulsed over novel elections, democratic Iraqis and Afghans are killing terrorists, a no longer secure al Qaeda is fragmented after losing Afghanistan, we are pressuring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Libya to reform, and after 25 years of somnolence the United States is finally fighting back against Islamic fascism. By Meyerson’s logic, 1942 was far more disastrous than 1939, when the sway of prewar autocracies was unquestioned and we were at peace.
How odd that Meyerson, a vice chairman of a national socialist organization, has become a harsh critic of American support for democratic reform in the Middle East.
But then we remember that the prime directive of the hard Left is to be against anything that Bush is for ? even if it means praising the hyper-capitalist, commodities speculator George Soros, whose machinations once nearly ruined the Bank of England along with its small depositors. In Meyerson’s gushing praise: “[Soros] made his money the old-fashioned way, on Wall Street.”
I also plead guilty to Meyerson’s other two charges: Abu Ghraib really was blown way out of proportion and was not simply, as Ted Kennedy slurred, a continuation under new management of Saddam’s gulag where tens of thousands perished.
…But if Meyerson’s skewers facts and twists progress into abject failure, take the example of someone using the name Gary Brecher of Encore magazine. In an article called “Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor, ” Brecher became incensed about a suggestion that neither the formal education nor the autodidacticism of the Hollywood elite granted them any privileged wisdom about American foreign policy:
“The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that’s how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets…Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one would come down. And when they did, damn! It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, “Hey these aren’t magic six-legged metal monsters, they’re just a bunch of victims like us.”
“Hate both sides” in fact, is not quite accurate, since in reality more often the invective is reserved only for the United States ? as when he cheers for the terrorists on 9/11, not for us. But then compare the recent antiwar hysteria that equates Abu Ghraib with Saddam’s death jails, Guantanamo with the Gulag and Nazi death camps, and the terrorist killers in Iraq with Minutemen.
…In an online magazine called LewRockwell.com (article titles in the online magazine range from “Heil, Abe” to “I Hate Rudy Giuliani”), one Gene Callahan takes off from where Devlin ended.
…In the past, Callahan (who predicted that after our October strike against the Taliban in Afghanistan there would be “thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths this winter due to massive famine”) has questioned the need for fighting both the Confederacy and Hitler, and now turns his anger in “Hanson Agonistes” to my conclusion that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima probably saved millions of lives.
“Among pundits currently urging Americans to embrace an eternal state of war, I find Victor Davis Hanson one of the most disturbing. .. His recent column defending the atomic bombing of Hiroshima reveals the Mr. Hyde lurking within our Dr. Jekyll. “
Callahan ignores the fact that the bomb ended, not perpetuated “eternal” war, abruptly saving millions of casualties on both sides. Only unconditional surrender discredited the militarists and thus allowed democracy to emerge ? and with it more than a half century of Japanese prosperity, security, and liberal government. And in the security of the present he forgets that the allies much earlier had tried a negotiated, rather than unconditional surrender and subsequent occupation of the enemy homeland in 1918 ? and got Hitler and another war later as thanks.
“Hanson would claim that the US had to demand unconditional surrender in order to prevent the possibility that a revived Japan might undertake aggression again in the future. (One wonders how near he believes that future must be ? can one wipe every member of an enemy nation to ensure safety from it forever?) But realistic worries on that front can be worked out in peace negotiations.”
He slurs the United States military of WWII by suggesting the logic of forcing Japan to surrender leads to “wipe (sic) every member of an enemy nation”. In this world of moral equivalence, rightwing dictatorships are usually always bereaved victims of leftwing American imperialism. So Callahan continues on his screed that we should have negotiated with the militarists of imperial Japan:
“That does not mean both sides in the discussion have the same voice. Japan was willing to discuss its terms of surrender, and was not demanding that of the US.”
Tell all that to the Chinese in Nanking or those who fought on Okinawa. In such a world of relativism it makes no difference who starts wars, much less whether they are fought by fascists or democracies. Indeed, to Callahan, the United States in World War II operated on the same premises that bin Laden does now:
“Note that this sort of thinking is exactly how Osama bin Laden justifies striking civilian targets in the US, Britain, or Spain. We must grant that the conduct of modern warfare blurs the line between combatants and non-combatants ? on which side of it are the workers in a bomb factory? But as blurry as we might make it, an infant in Hiroshima or a new immigrant delivering a sandwich to the World Trade Center are obviously non-combatants.”
Ponder that: Dropping a bomb on the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army to force a military cabal to surrender during a war they started that was taking 250,000 Asian lives a month is the same as blowing up an office building full of civilians at a time of peace.
Such a strange, strange world we live in now of David Duke praising Cindy Sheehan’s scapegoating Israel.
George Bush who risked his presidency to free millions of Iraqis is to be the moral equivalent of Jefferson Davis ? but perhaps is just as hated by the unhinged Right because he is not enough like their beloved Jefferson Davis.
Forcing imperial Japan to surrender is the same as terrorists blowing up the World Trade Center.
And stopping the genocide of Saddam and promoting constitutional government are warmongering.
And all this nonsense transpires in the midst of a war in which the only way we can lose is to turn on each other and give up.
Only VDH can sum up the situation so succinctly.
See author page