WASHINGTON — Our liberal friends are in a fury of indignation
once again! This cannot be good for their health. A couple weeks
back the source of their anger was the Administration’s repeated
references to the 1930s, which is apparently a very sore spot with
them. Now they are again indignados, owing to our suave
president’s mention of Iraq during a speech commemorating the fifth
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Presumably, we could prevent these
unseemly eruptions if the Republicans would clear their speeches
with Dr. Howard Dean. Of course, if the volcanic doctor had to vet
all of them he might suffer some sort of seizure, though how would
anyone know? He seems to be in extremis much of the time.
The war in Iraq has obviously gotten to the Democrats. A few
decades back the war in Vietnam got to them too, but in the war’s
early years it was a minority of Democrats who opposed the war.
Only after the hellish Richard Nixon became president did defeatism
spread more widely among what had once been called Cold War
liberals. Yet at least in the Vietnam War the anti-war liberals
could point to a plausible exit strategy, to wit, negotiations. The
North Vietnamese Communists had the sense to present themselves as
ready to negotiate and with a dulcet offer to the Americans, “peace
and freedom and democracy in a united Vietnam” — ha, ha, ha. Today
there is no one plausible to negotiate with in Iraq or in
Afghanistan, and there is nothing even meretriciously attractive to
negotiate about — though Nancy Pelosi adorned in a burkha has its
appeal, as does fat Senator Teddy Kennedy denied his firewater.
I have to admit that when we invaded Iraq, and so many Democrats
were hailing the invasion as a blow for freedom, I, in my youthful
idealism, thought this would be one war they would not abscond
from. Saddam was a contemporary Hitler. He had used weapons of mass
destruction on his own people and for the purposes of genocide. He
defied United Nations resolutions to search for them and was
usually ambiguous as to whether he had them. He labored to dupe
leaders in the Arab world and his generals into thinking he had
them. (See “Saddam’s Delusions” in the May/June 2006 Foreign
Affairs.) He gave rewards to suicide bombers, and harbored
terrorists on his soil, for instance the late Abu Nidal, the
mastermind of terrorist attacks in over 20 countries, including the
hijacking of the Achille Lauro. How closely Saddam was
linked to the Islamofascists is a matter for historians to thrash
out; but he certainly abetted their mischief, and for years prior
to the arrival of our troops at his gaudy palaces both he and the
terrorists were enemies of our country and our Western values.
On that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush seemed
to agree until the 2004 presidential elections drew nigh. Then what
had been a small anti-war movement composed mainly of cranks such
as Noam Chomsky began to gather up liberal Democrats until it now
comprises much of the Democratic leadership. How do we explain
it?
In a thoughtful and timely Wall Street Journal column
Bret Stephens offers this: “Here’s a puzzle: Why is it so
frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in
the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when
Islamism gains — namely liberals — are typically the most
reluctant to fight?” They have also been the first to bug out of
Iraq, which one would think does not put liberals in a good light.
Stephens advances several reasons, none of which diminishes the
irony of his point. He offers the liberals’ “instinct for
pacifism,” their moral relativism, their weakness for appeasement
and their confusion of Islamism with opposition to materialism and
to the corporate world. But I have an additional explanation. The
liberals are uncomfortable being on the side of bourgeois
conventionality. Some see this as anti-Americanism. Actually it is
something more amusing.
It stems from the liberals’ only unwavering political value, the
political value that now stands alone at the heart of liberalism.
That value is a misdemeanor in the criminal codes of most civilized
countries. It is disturbance of the peace. Drop a liberal into a
community where conventions have been established and where
civility reigns and our liberal friend will find some triviality to
protest. Our liberal friends are congenitally alienated. Thus for a
few months, perhaps even a year, they opposed the Islamofascists
and favored bringing down Saddam. Then they noticed whose side they
were on. Yuk, and so they oppose this war, while offering no
alternative — unless it be Pelosi in a burkha and rotund Teddy on
the wagon.
