Michael Goodwin points out that, in their latest debates, the Democratic candidates seem to be “sleepwalking through history” about the war on terror:
What was once a bipartisan concern about the new phenomenon of lethal nonstate actors such as Al Qaeda has been reduced to denunciations of waterboarding and attacks on the Patriot Act.
The article is illustrated with a cartoon of Hillary, Edwards, and Obama as the three willfully evil-denying monkeys:
This seems accurate as far as it goes. But it strikes me that the Democratic candidates—and many of the Democrats in Congress—paradoxically see almost nothing but evil in today’s Iraq. As Goodwin points out:
The one mention of the troop “surge” came from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. He declared it “is not working,” no matter what the facts say, and Obama made a similar point without using the word.
And, of course, there’s the Congressional Democratic leaders’ continuing determination to defund the war unless they’re able to dictate a withdrawal timetable. And this despite the fact that even newspapers such as the NY Times are now regularly publishing tentatively optimistic articles such as this one, entitled “Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves” (yes, I know it’s full of “well, but’s” and “on the other hand’s”—but still, it manages to grudgingly spotlight recent improvements).
That cartoon of the three candidates could serve just as well if the sight they were denying was the good done in Iraq, rather than the evil of the terrorist threat. There are two common threads here: the first is denial itself, and the second is refusal to give President Bush and the Republicans any credit whatsoever for their successes.
Christopher Hitchens also writes about the Democrats and Iraq, noting:
What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism [about recent positive developments in Iraq]…but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased.
It does sometimes appear to be that way. Politicians’ self-centered concerns with their own electability would tend to make it painfully difficult for them to credit the opposition with policy successes, even those good for the nation as a whole.
But I’m afraid there’s more to it than that for those on the hard Left. Not all liberals, and certainly not all Democrats, qualify as being on the Left, of course. But the base to which the Party increasingly genuflects appears increasingly Leftist in sympathies and composition.
Here’s the type of thing many Leftists say—and believe. I bring you exhibit A, journalist John Pilger, speaking about Iraq in an interview on Dec 31, 2003 with the generally Left-leaning news organization Democracy Now:
I think the resistance in Iraq is incredibly important for all of us. I think that we depend on the resistance to win so that other countries might not be attacked, so that our world in a sense becomes more secure. Now, I don’t like resistances that produce the kind of terrible civilian atrocities that this one has, but that is true of all of the resistances. This one is a resistance against a rapacious power, that if it is not stopped in Iraq will go on as we now know to North Korea where Mr. Cheney and others are just chomping at the bit to have a crack at that country. So, what the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for the rest of the world, I think if the United States’ military machine and the Bush administration can suffer—well, the let’s say, quote, defeat, unquote, because it was never a complete defeat in Vietnam—but if they suffer something like that in Iraq.
The Left wants a defeat for the US in Iraq and a triumph for the Iraqi resistance, in order that the US will be weakened worldwide. And the Left doesn’t really care what the nature of that so-called “resistance” is, even if it’s a viciously totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic group such as al Qaeda, who would just as soon behead Pilger himself and all his cronies if they weren’t so very useful to them. As long as the “resistance” in Iraq is against the US, Bush, and Cheney, that’s enough to make Pilger and company embrace murderous thugs who would stomp on all human rights—and certainly on anything we know as liberalism, classical and/or modern-day—if they had their way.
Yes, I know that the Democratic candidates don’t share Pilger’s extreme anti-American stance. But unfortunately their party has too many people who do. And, unfortunately, I could rewrite Pilger’s statement from the Democratic candidates’ point of view and it might go something like this:
I think that we depend on the resistance to win so that we can be elected. Now, we don’t like resistances that produce the kind of terrible civilian atrocities that this one has, but that is true of all of the resistances. This one is a resistance against a policy begun by our enemy, Bush. So, the outcome of this resistance is terribly important for our electability, if the United States’ military machine and the Bush administration can suffer something like the Vietnam defeat in Iraq.
Note that on one point I give Pilger more credit than I do the Democratic candidates: curiously enough, he puts defeat in Vietnam in quotes. PIlger may recognize that the US “defeat” there was at least partly self-inflicted, caused by both military and political restraints, including the propaganda work of the Left itself. I’m not so sure today’s Democratic candidates would recognize that fact.
