It is way too easy to make fun of Tina Brown’s narcissism and
self-absorption, but I just couldn’t resist this wonderful example
from her latest column in the Washington Post.
Of course we can guess most of the reasons why Tina, like all those
beautiful people with whom she makes such a point of being
intimate, despises George W. Bush, but this time she has come up
with a new one. It is that Bush’s “rush to war” in Iraq — now
legendary on the Upper West Side however dubious it may be
elsewhere — deprived us of the two years and a bit that Franklin
Roosevelt wisely allowed for discussion and argument between the
German invasion of Poland and the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor.
“The trouble this time around is that the president allowed no
time for a validating debate,” she complains. As a result, the
out-pouring of appreciation for “the Greatest Generation” over the
Memorial Day weekend left the baby boomers, poor lambs, feeling
left out and with “the sullen sense that they did have a whiff of
their own Greatest Generation moment, after 9/11 — and then, too
soon, were cheated out of it. Nine-eleven handed Bush something FDR
did not have even after the Nazis marched into Paris: an
across-the-board national consensus to go after a manifestly evil
enemy with all the power — military, diplomatic, economic,
everything — the nation and its allies could muster. Instead, our
president chose to go after Iraq for reasons that become murkier
every week.”
Never mind the dead and wounded Americans. Never mind the dead
and wounded Iraqis. Never mind the thugocracy still waiting in the
wings to take over in Iraq the moment we turn our backs on the
place, as it now appears only too likely we shall. What is any of
this to Tina Brown? What she cannot forgive is that W has deprived
her and her fellow boomers of the thing they value most in the
world: yet another reason to feel good about themselves.
Miss Brown’s easy “Instead” in the passage above also suggests
that she belongs, not surprisingly, to that school of the
President’s critics which pretends to think — surely they can’t
really think? — that his options after deposing the Taliban in
Afghanistan were easy ones. In the same spirit, a correspondent of
theTimes of London criticizes Iain Duncan Smith, the former Leader
of the Opposition, for writing in that paper that he was “tired of the
critics who fail to offer any serious alternative” to the
Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. “The alternative,” thunders Mr. Roy
Hill of Guildford in Surrey, “was to confront terrorism and
al-Qaeda directly.”
Ah yes, but was it a serious alternative? Like Mr. Duncan Smith,
I fear we have to say that it was not. For some reason, al Qaeda
has chosen to organize itself in just such a way as to prevent us
from confronting it directly. It was very thoughtless of them, no
doubt, but there it is. As a result Bush had only the choice of
doing nothing militarily and whacking somebody — preferably
somebody who deserved a good whacking anyway — whose example might
give pause to others of America’s enemies who were tempted to
provide sanctuary and support to al Qaeda. I was one of those who
thought that the whacking would have been more usefully
administered to someone other than Saddam Hussein, but I never
doubted that a whacking of some description was necessary. The
alternative of doing nothing was, as Iain Duncan Smith wrote,
“infantile.”
Such people as Mr. Hill and Miss Brown appear to imagine that we
would be doing nothing but getting on with our business if we
weren’t fighting in Iraq — which is why they and others of the
fashionably anti-Bush party insist so strongly that the invasion
“has hugely encouraged terrorism” (as Mr. Hill writes) by
encouraging al Qaeda recruitment. But al Qaeda never needed Iraq as
an incitement to recruitment. They had plenty of recruits already,
and if we weren’t now fighting them in Iraq, we would almost
certainly be fighting them somewhere else — most likely Pakistan,
whose own descent into chaos has been retarded by the events in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush may have done everything wrong in Iraq, but it is foolish
to suppose that it was either that or a righteous, “Greatest
Generation”-style war on which we could all agree. Anything we did
would probably have produced at least as much trouble and
heartbreak as Iraq has done, and the complainers are contrasting
our war there not with a better war somewhere else but with the
pre-war, pre-9/11 world that is gone forever.
