Freedman

Here we are engaged in a struggle with utterly savage people who used to rule Iraq and the utterly depraved people that used to rule Afghanistan and the world’s excuse for sitting it out is that we hurt their feelings.

The hegemonic power of the intellectual world, the liberals, are like ruling classes in all times. They always get to define the boundaries of debate. The get to decide which of the many ways a remark or statement can be interpreted is the right one.

Thomas Freedman writes that if the elections turn out decently then maybe the middle ground of Europe can be pulled back in and enticed to help. Now think about that. If we defeat the Nazis then the great and good of the world might consider helping us out but if we don’t then it proves that we should have left the Nazi’s in power in the first place. That is the European morality. Join a fight after it is already won. Ask them to join in when victory is anything less than certain is to force them to take a risk for their principles, to hurt their feelings.

The truly strange thing is how they get it turned around so that if they bug out of a fight it is our fault because we must have hurt their feelings. This is the trick the hegemon can always seem to pull off. Point to their pique as evidence, no proof, of your insensitivity. It was the same with Howard Dean last night. He talks about how divisive the Republicans are and them compares him to Hitler. Of course, he doesn’t exactly compare him to Hitler. “It is not enough to have military power, Hitler had military power, Stalin had military power, you have to have moral power.” Now of course the liberals that interpret this give it the most benign interpretation possible. He is merely making the perfectly sound argument that While Bush’s policy has military strength it is somehow deficient in moral standing in the eyes of the world. An example of this would be Hitler.

Well logically you can put him on a continuum with Hitler, but do you want to? Isn’t that a rather divisive way to make your point? Isn’t there a slightly less pejorative example of an historical figure that could be used as an example of alienating allies or gaining military strength at the expense of moral standing in the world?

And do you really want to make that analogy when our troops are dying in Iraq? As a man that claims we have to stay there and finish the job no matter what happens does it really help to compare the war as somehow being on a moral continuum with Hitler’s actions?

What is harder to understand is the position of someone like Freedman. If he believes that Sadaam was as bad as he appears to believe then why does he make excuses for Russia and France, nations that profited from his regime and maneuvered to protect it? who have since shown more interest in collecting their outstanding loans for weapons and palaces than they have been in helping the people of Iraq. And what, besides the Kyoto treaty, do they have as evidence that the Bush administration is at fault in our relations with the petulant powers? To make this argument it seems to me that you have to have be saying that the bush administration could have pursued the policy of removing Sadaam without alienating these so-called moderate powers. But what if it is not the way in which the policy was implemented but the very fact of the policy itself that is the problem? What if, aside from leaving Sadaam Hussein in power in Iraq, there is nothing they could have done to keep the Europeans sweet? Did they not go through all the motions the liberals said would add legitimacy to the enterprise? Go to the UN, hear everyone out respectfully? Except for not going into Iraq what could have been done to not make us “radio active”?

I hear the litany, something about Kyoto treaty, the apparently all important treaty that no one besides Romania had ratified, that our own Senate voted 97 to nothing not to ratify while Clinton was negotiating it, that Clinton himself never bothered to submit to the Senate? Our stand on global warming is so shocking to the moral sensibilities of the world that they take the side of these terrorists against us and the 90% of the people in Iraq that want the elections? Oh, the old Europe comment? Well, the intelligentsia wants Europe defined as France and Germany and Belgium to wield as a rhetorical weapon against the administration but I don’t see why the Administration should cooperate. And I think it was fair to point out that the nations that had recently been living under dictatorship were the ones that were willing to step up. And how does the Rumsfeld comment compare to the comment made a week later by the moderate soul that we are guilty of offending? Can you imagine Rumsfeld saying the Europeans had ‘missed a good opportunity to shut up?’

It is really quite fascinating. Freedman goes through a whole article making the argument that the administration’s boorish behavior has caused a rift with our allies, but every example of boorish behavior he gives is of the anti-Americans saying something vile. And yet, amazingly, this is offered as evidence of the Bush administration’s lack of tact.

“Europe, for its part, has gone so crazy over the Bush administration that the normally thoughtful Guardian newspaper completely lost its mind last week and published a column that openly hoped for the assassination of President Bush, saying: "John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. - where are you now that we need you?"

Now remember, that is being offered as evidence of how bad Bush is. Shouldn’t an essay that purports to show how the Bush administration’s behavior has caused something be filled with examples of the Bush administration’s behavior? Don’t examples of European’s “loosing their minds” support an argument about, I don’t know, the mental instability of Europeans? Of course, this difficulty is dealt with by the slick appositive “the normally thoughtful Guardian newspaper.” Well, yes, if we start with the presumption that the Europeans are thoughtful and sensible then the cause of anything they do unworthy of those adjectives must be found outside of them. Usually this is America, though sometimes for variety we can use Israel. Too bad the normally valiant Europeans are prevented from confronting Arab terrorism by the morally questionable policies of the Israelis. It is the liberal worldview in a nutshell. The actor actually doing the bad behavior is naturally good and so the ‘root cause’ must be found somewhere else, unless, of course, the actor is America.