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Friday, April 25, 2003
Hell froze over. Bush invited to join Mensa.
...and David Horowitz's FrontPage actually has something worth reading.
Did the Left Go Too Far on Iraq?
I'm suprised that Horowitz didn't edit out some of the liberal's arguments. Some great quotes:
Jamie, the simple answer to the question you pose about "the Left" is that George Bush has antagonized many people on both sides of the Atlantic so much that they don't trust a word he says and don't believe the claims his leading officials make. In contrast to his promises to be a uniter, not a divider, Bush has pursued a very divisive social and economic policy and has made no concessions at all regarding fiscal, monetary and environmental policy. He has draped himself in religion in ways that most secular liberals--not just "the Left" find most unsettling. His Texas roots are linked to some corporate officials who may soon be behind bars following the Enron scandals, and he seems not to mind in the slightest that his tax cuts will make already existing economic inequalities worse. In Europe, he is reviled for his decisions on the death penalty in Texas, environmental policies and then the Manichean religious rhetoric with which he led the war on terrorism after September 11th.
[snip]
Did the anti-war left go too far? Well, despite the fact that we had the largest peace demonstrations in American history, we had a war didn’t we? What a strange question! To raise principled questions about whether a war was just and your government is not “going too far.” In fact, I would argue it’s my right and obligation as an American to point out the mistakes my government is making. And, by the way, just because we won the war still doesn’t make it right. This war doesn’t become a better idea just because it was easily accomplished. History is filled with easy wars after all.
I do find it fascinating how people don’t seem to care that WE built Saddam into the frightening power he was until a few weeks ago. We provided him with $40B worth of aid in the 1980s and are responsible for the monster we created. As a historian, I find this puzzling but I guess in the illiterate and ignorant nation that is America today I shouldn’t be surprised. Heck, a huge number of Americans think Saddam was intimately involved in 9/11, an assertion, no matter how many times W repeats it, for which there is absolutely no evidence.
As for the “ends justify the means” arguments advanced both before and after the war, I just can’t sign on to these arguments even now. In fact the most frightening thing is to think back on the lies told to get us into this war. Think about how few of the major arguments made by W and the boys to get us into this war have turned out to be true so far: Where are the WMDs? Where are the Al-Qaeda terrorists? If his military was really so weak, he wasn’t much of a threat to his neighbors, was he? There isn’t much that has been proven true of the cassus belli arguments advanced by the administration in the last few weeks, eh?
I am, of course, glad that Saddam is gone. Who wouldn’t be? I’ve said I’d be glad to see him go since I began blogging about the proposed war in August. It’s a red herring to try and tar those who oppose this war as “anti-American” or, to use Instapundit’s now infamous phrase “objectively pro-Saddam” because that simply isn’t the case. Most of us who were against the war are glad to see Saddam go and to try and tell us that our principled opposition to the war was somehow anti-Semitic or pro-fascist is, quite simply, a load of you-know-what. It’s a question that involves the old McCarthyite trick of guilt-by-association and unworthy of a response. I refuse to be drawn into that bogus discussion.
Of course many Americans may be whistling a different tune about this war in the next few months as our occupation / democracy-building / oil-extracting / empire-building scheme will cost tens of billions of dollars and add greatly to our federal deficit and possibly even be a drag on our economy.
Lots of good reading here, all the more suprising when you consider the source.
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