A Weekend of Riches
Victor Davis Hansen delivers another of his brilliant and topical essays.
The Subtexts of War
Culture, oil, and reckless dissent.
July 7, 2006
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Throughout this war there are various truths generally recognized, but rarely voiced.
First, before 9/11 the Western hard right-wing allowed radical Islam a pass — and then afterwards the Left did worse. That fact helps to explain the strange exemption given radical Islam in the West even today.
…
Finally, there are a number of influential Americans — let us be frank — who want us to forfeit this effort in Iraq . For some prominent Democrats, like a Sen. Kennedy or Sen. Durbin, who compares our wartime military on occasion to Saddam’s Baathists or Nazis, it is an issue of simple partisanship. If Iraq blows up in the face of the United States , and we can still avoid another September 11, then they wager that Bush and his cohorts, in the manner of a wrecked Johnson or Nixon administration, might alone suffer the political consequences. For them, collateral damage to America is worth the risk incurred by their own sleazy rhetoric.
Others of the Michael Moore/Cindy Sheehan brand are far more unbalanced, of course. They have either praised the enemy outright (jihadists as “Minutemen”) or slurred the present administration (Bush as “world’s greatest terrorist”) as consistently as any al Qaedist mouthpiece. Still, we can’t call these folk exactly fringe-types — not when the Democratic elite queue up for Moore ’s premiers or praise Sheehan’s madness. Just as mainstream Muslim organizations don’t rush to condemn Islamic radicalism, so too liberal Democrats rarely denounce the rhetoric of their own fanatical Left.
True, during the 1998 Balkans campaign, there were right-wing Lindbergians who wanted Clinton to fail and the United States to get stung in the Balkans and return to its 1930s isolationism. But these critics were small in numbers, isolated from the mainstream political opposition, and quickly silenced by the brevity and economy of warfare waged solely from 30,000 feet.
There is a final unspoken truth as well. Al Qaeda might not go away soon. The Europeans, as in the Clinton years, will always triangulate. North Korea and Iran , both of whom started nuclear programs in the 1990s, will still issue unhinged threats. Barring its discovery of some clandestine government effort to monitor radical Christian fundamentalists better left secret, the New York Times will keep leaking confidential national-security measures. But the time will come when there is once again a Democratic administration.
In that climate, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, and Howard Dean, or their epigones, will still have to persuade the American people that radical Islam means to destroy us. They can’t say their war is cooked up in Texas , but will instead have to deal with the Sheehanites and the loose-cannon bloggers they either appeased or encouraged.
Indeed.
Eminently worth the time for a full reading.
Hat Tip: The Good Colonel
UPDATE (beneath the fold)
