By P. David Hornik on 2.9.04 @ 12:11AM
Since Vietnam, things have had a way of working out this way.
JERUSALEM -- I turn on CNN, and I see people being grilled --
Bush and Blair. What did you know, and when did you know it? If you
had known then what you know now, would you have done what you did?
Or did you already know it, and pull a big hoax on all of us?
The War on Terror is barely two years old, and already the two
statesmen mainly responsible for waging it are in the dock. The
grim media interrogators, our self-appointed "representatives,"
fire questions at them. The opposition parties sling mud at them.
And one can't blame it all on the Left: Britain's Conservative
Party is trying to conserve its prowar stance at the same time that
it pillories Blair.
Since Vietnam, things have had a way of working out this way. In
that conflict, the "moral" castigation of America mounted, Nixon
found himself in the Watergate dock, and finally all U.S. forces
were yanked from the arena -- setting the stage for the boat
people, the "reeducation centers," and the Cambodian holocaust.
Along came smiling Jimmy Carter, proclaiming peace on earth, only
to be stunned by evidence -- the Iran hostage crisis, the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan -- that there were still bad guys out there
unimpressed by all that American "niceness."
A couple of years later Israel tried to wage a war on terror in
Lebanon, but after a few months it found itself in the dock over
the Sabra and Shatilah massacres. Forgotten -- actually, hardly
anyone ever cared -- was the PLO's brutal occupation of southern
Lebanon; now all the rage was Israel's alleged sins. Meanwhile, the
war's one significant achievement -- the exile of Arafat and his
gang to Tunis, creating breathing space for Palestinian moderacy --
was forgotten, too; and in 1993 an Israeli Labor government revived
the PLO, brought it here, and plunged Israel into its ongoing
nightmare.
Reagan, in the 1980s, had to deal with calumny and hysteria over
Pershings in Europe and a tough anti-Soviet line, until -- what,
ho! -- the Soviets collapsed. The open, undeniable brutality of
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the threat to oil, made it easier --
relatively -- for Bush Sr. in the first Gulf War; Clinton's status
as a beloved Democrat made it easier for him in Bosnia and
Kosovo.
But the general pattern has been that democratic leaders who
wage war on terrorists, totalitarians, enemies of freedom, are
guilty until proven innocent. Never more so than now, when alleged
intelligence failures, alleged deceptions, are all the rage. The
Free World turns in, snarling, upon itself.
Meanwhile, ricin shows up in the U.S. Senate. Eight flights from
Europe to the U.S. get canceled in one day because of intelligence
tips that they'll get blown to bits. Bombers kill forty in Moscow;
seventy in twin attacks in Kurdistan. A bus bombing in Jerusalem
hardly registers anymore. Ho-hum, I never promised you a rose
garden. But Bush and Blair are in the dock, and grim committees are
searching every cranny of what they knew, when they knew it, and
what they did.
Should citizens of democracies blindly follow their leaders? Of
course not. Do those leaders never do anything wrong? Of course
not. Bush and Blair may have oversold the WMD threat (at least,
it's easy to say now; I wasn't saying it then). America's
incremental approach to Vietnam looks -- in hindsight -- unwise; it
should either have stayed out, or fought to win -- that's the view
from 2004. Israel shouldn't have let the Phalanges militiamen into
those camps -- now, at least, it seems clear.
No, the leaders of democracies are mortals; they err, they
misjudge situations, they take wrong tacks. But I wonder if, in
wartime, we shouldn't give them more leeway, as they used to do in
the pre-Vietnam era. The greater humility and deference that
populations -- and even the media -- showed their leaders in those
days was a way of acknowledging that these guys had the toughest
job, that if we were the ones making all those decisions, we
wouldn't get them all right either. It was also a way of
maintaining a basic moral perspective, a basic distinction between
elected, civilized leaders and deadly enemies.
If the domestic opponents of Bush and Blair were claiming that
they can manage the War on Terror more effectively, that would be
one thing. But most of them, instead, are casting doubt on whether
this war is necessary at all -- and using a flap about WMD and
intelligence to try and delegitimize Bush and Blair altogether.
Considering the very real threats we continue to face from al
Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, et al., that's
what really scares me.
topics:
Education, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea, Oil
