Victor Davis Hanson’s latest NRO piece addresses that portion of American society that belittles President Bush and the administration’s policy toward Iraq and the Middle East without providing any meaningful alternative other than the continuation of the disastrous policies that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. The entire article is well worth reading, and the following will give you a taste for it:
Do the trivialists want Saddam and the Taliban back in power? Does a Mr. Allawi repulse them? Do they wish 10,000 American troops back in Saudi Arabia? Perhaps they want Libya to resume its work on nukes? Do they care whether Dr. Khan returns to his lab? Or do they think it is child’s play to hike back through the Dark Ages into the Pakistani borderlands looking for bin Laden? And is it all that easy to have prevented another 9/11 attack for almost three years now of constant vigilance? Perhaps they would like to deal with the corrupt, duplicitous, and tottering Saudi Royal family, which just happens to sit on 25 percent of the world’s oil reserves ? without whose daily production the economies of Japan, Korea, and China would almost immediately grind to a halt.
Only belatedly has John Kerry grasped that his shrill supporters are often not just trivial but stark-raving mad. If he doesn’t quickly jump into some Levis, shoot off a shotgun, and start hanging out in Ohio, he will lose this election and do so badly.
The war that Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards once caricatured as a fiasco and amoral is now, for all its tragedies, emerging in some sort of historical perspective as a long-overdue liberation.
. . . For over a year now, we have witnessed a level of invective not seen since the summer of 1964 ? much of it the result of a dying 60’s generation’s last gasps of lost self-importance. Instead of the “innocent” Rosenbergs and “framed” Alger Hiss we now get the whisk-the-bin-Laden-family-out-of-the-country conspiracy. Michael Moore is a poor substitute for the upfront buffoonery of Abbie Hoffman.
. . . It was politically unwise and idealistic ? not smart and cynical ? for Mr. Bush to gamble his presidency on getting rid of fascists in Iraq. There really was a tie between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein ? just as Mr. Gore and Mr. Clinton once believed and Mr. Putin and Mr. Allawi now remind us. The United States really did plan to put Iraqi oil under Iraqi democratic supervision for the first time in the country’s history. And it did.
This war ? like all wars ? is a terrible thing; but far, far worse are the mass murder of 3,000 innocents and the explosion of a city block in Manhattan, a ghoulish Islamic fascism and unfettered global terrorism, and 30 years of unchecked Baathist mass murder. So for myself, I prefer to be on the side of people like the Kurds, Elie Wiesel, Hamid Karzai, and Iyad Allawi rather than the idiotocrats like Jacques Chirac, Ralph (the Israelis are “puppeteers”) Nader, Michael Moore, and Billy Crystal.
Sometimes life’s choices really are that simple.