WASHINGTON —This week in his speech before the national
convention of the American Legion, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld made an unconscionable faux pas. He defended our present
policy in Iraq and our war on terror by citing historic events and
quoting Winston Churchill and Georges Clemenceau. That is a rude
way to discuss policy with one’s Democratic opponents. The
historical record is a particularly sore subject with the likes of
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who inveighed against
Rumsfeld’s speech as “reckless.” History has not been going his way
for a while. Reid’s equivalent in the House of Representatives, the
Hon. Nancy Pelosi, spoke of the Secretary’s impairment…and she
was not referring to his golf swing. Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat
on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused Rumsfeld of
questioning the critics’ patriotism.
These are very touchy pols. Leader Reid went on to elaborate
that the administration that Rumsfeld serves “is more interested in
lashing out at its political enemies than it is in winning the war
on terror and in bringing an end to the war in Iraq.” But Rumsfeld
never in his entire speech mentioned “political enemies.” As James
Taranto notes in his indispensable Best of the Web
Today column, the only American politician Rumsfeld mentioned
was the late Senator William Borah who upon hearing of Hitler’s
1939 invasion of Poland sighed: “Lord, if only I could have talked
with Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” Borah was a
Republican isolationist, so perhaps we can understand the
aforementioned Democrats’ indignation. As I say, they are
exceptionally touchy.
But they are also ignoramuses. The entire speech is cast on a
very high level. It is dispassionate, erudite, and difficult to
refute. The only individuals Rumsfeld criticizes are a handful of
journalists and whoever in Amnesty International called Gitmo “the
gulag of our times.” Otherwise he sticks to a theme that is
unassailable. Our opponents in Iraq and among the terrorists are
nihilists, every bit as dangerous as the Nazis. In the years prior
to World War II, Rumsfeld argues, “a sentiment took root that
contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge
in Europe and Asia could be appeased [world war] might be avoided.”
Rumsfeld asserts that the appeasers suffered from “a certain amount
of cynicism and moral confusion,” concluding with a paraphrase of
Churchill’s great line that the appeaser seems to believe that if
he feeds the alligator enough, “the alligator will eat him
last.”
I would argue that there is a difference between the appeasers
of the 1930s and today’s. Both have been smug, but today’s are smug
and opportunistic. In the 1930s the appeasers were in power, and as
Rumsfeld notes they could ridicule and ignore Churchill and his
allies. Today the appeasers are out of power so they ridicule and
misrepresent those who are directing our war against what Rumsfeld
calls “a new type of fascism.” Today’s appeasers misrepresent the
Bush foreign policy for their own political advancement.
In the months after our victory in Iraq, they recognized that as
long as they stuck by our wartime president they would be in the
minority. Thus one by one they deserted the war they had approved
and sided with the war’s early opponents, starry-eyed radicals such
as Professor Noam Chomsky. Perhaps if the anti-war Democrats take
the White House in 2008 Dr. Chomsky will be their secretary of
defense, and they can choose as secretary of state one of the Dixie
Chicks. I suggest the one who chews bubble gum.
My colleague at The American Spectator Jed Babbin
considers my assessment of today’s appeasers in the Democratic
Party too mild. Where I accuse them of being smug and
opportunistic, he accuses them of being smug and guilty of adhering
to moral equivalence. Sozzled in multiculturalism they see America,
says Babbin, “as no better than any other country regardless of its
nature. We’re morally and socially no better than Iran.”
Is the thing possible? Do the likes of Reid and Pelosi think we
are no better than the Iranian Islamofascists who whoop it up for
suicide bombers and are governed by a zany who looks like an
eternal graduate student from one of our cow colleges? Well, the
Democrats who responded so hysterically to Rumsfeld’s speech are
not very civilized. Rumsfeld is. In his speech he acknowledged that
in this war there have been “mistakes and setbacks and casualties.”
But he put them in perspective, quoting Clemenceau’s observation
that war is a “series of catastrophes that results in victory.”
Citing history and quoting lines like that can only bring the
Democrats to a boil. Theirs is the party of bumper stickers.
