The Bush Administration’s interest in preemptively neutralizing the obvious Iraqi threat to the region has been debated from all sides, while the New York Times, Washington Post, and other liberal media outlets have all but published precise battle plans and detailed logistical papers for Saddam to peruse at his leisure. The babbling from the chattering classes would seem to indicate that most of them believe that American action is more inappropriate than inaction until AFTER the West is horrifically attacked — again.
There is a bizarre alignment of voices these days. On one side we have the usual pacifists, appeasers, liberals, Democrats, Europeans, and the Leftmedia. The same people who always analyze disasters in hindsight and impotently wring their collective hands [“what could we have done to prevent 9/11?”] are the ones who always and vehemently oppose doing ANYTHING in real time. Even after 9/11, they still choose to oppose appropriate profiling at airports, even though 100% of the perpetrators share the same ethnic, religious, and physical attributes. Not even ironclad evidence can persuade them to abandon their mindless embrace of masochistic multiculturalism and their willful, suicidal blindness to reality.
However, in the matter of defanging Iraq, these pitiful but always-predictable fools have been joined by a number of people who are putatively on the Right, but who now join the cacophony of “do nothing until it is too late” voices. It is instructive to look at who these folks are, assess their reasoning and rationales, and objectively determine if their opinions have any validity.
For the first time in many years, liberals are touting the virtues of military service and combat experience. That is because some Republican hawks and retired military people have joined them in their opposition to neutering Saddam. So now the Left urges us to listen to the voices of experience, the wisdom of the warfighters.
For most of the ’90s, the fact that no one in the Clinton Administration had a military background, let alone even a warm, fuzzy feeling about the military in general, was considered irrelevant to discussions about bombing aspirin factories, firing a few random cruise missiles from time to time, or intervening in Somalia and the Balkans. But now, we are told, we must respect, nay REVERE, the opinions of (only) the former generals who oppose preemptive action. These men, formerly pariahs, are now The Voices Of Reason And Moderation.
But why, one asks, are men such as Generals Norman Schwarzkopf, Colin Powell, and Anthony Zinni, and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft so opposed to aborting a WOMD threat to the West? And why don’t weapons of mass destruction interest a small but vocal group of Republican congressmen, and conservative columnists such as Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, and Samuel Francis? Why are they espousing essentially the same political opinions as Jimmy Carter, the New York Times, and our “good friends” in Saudi Arabia?
This happens to be one of those brief, not-so-shining moments in history when many people with different axes to grind choose to use the same wheel. The legacy of the failed Gulf War haunts Schwarzkopf, Zinni, and Scowcroft, and WOULD haunt Colin Powell if he had enough self-awareness to acknowledge the major error he made when he advised George I to cease hostilities before finishing the mission.
To their credit, Schwarzkopf and Zinni disagreed with stopping the successful military rout of the Iraqis, but neither of them wants the American public to realize and remember just how incomplete the job was. And Scowcroft gave his tacit approval to the craven idea of the public relations value and the “symmetry” of a 100-hour war, an ideological “gift” from Powell to the equally vacuous George I.
But unlike the others, Powell has continued to coddle the evil and corrupt Saudi kleptocracy to this day, and as has been predicted (“responding to terrorism in lieu of preemption is no longer an option”), he will undoubtedly leave George II’s cabinet in a blaze of gushing praise and effusive adulation from the same Leftmedia that so adores McCainiacs, Jim Jeffords, and other RINO’s.
So the first agenda of the new doves is to leave Saddam alone, so as not to call attention to the incomplete Desert Storm/Gulf War event. Even George I has a vested interest in this legacy, and he, as well as Scowcroft, would like the American people to focus on the minor mission accomplished (freeing Kuwait) and forget that the greater task (eliminating Saddam) was abandoned.
The strange confluence of Right and Left also includes the second group of new doves, people such as Buchanan et.al., who have a long history of Israel-bashing and, at times, frank anti-Semitism. Advocating Israeli inaction while Saddam lobbed Scuds into Jewish cities during the Gulf War, and continuing to urge saintly restraint in the face of today’s almost-daily suicide/homicide bombers, they invariably apply stringent, civilized, Western standards of behavior to Israel’s responses in the face of Arab barbarism. However, they do not feel this way when American interests are involved; they were hawks after 9/11, and when the USS Cole was attacked.
And therein lies the secret of these new doves. Buchanan and his ilk know that Saddam cannot reach America with his rudimentary nuclear weapons. And they are confident that if he is given enough time, he will try to do the unthinkable: destroy Israel with one sudden attack, one single warhead, and achieve his true goal before he dies —– to become the greatest Arab/Islamic martyr in their miserable, destructive history. He will live forever in their hearts, while the Arab apologists will “deplore” his action, the liberals will wring their hands and fill the airways with their crocodile tears, the Arab “street” will dance on rooftops once again, and the collateral damage to the “Palestinians” will be overlooked and then forgiven by the Arab world. They were, after all, only pawns in the larger struggle to annihilate Israel.
The Europeans will breathe a collective sigh of relief after America THEN destroys Saddam, and the anti-Semitic French won’t even be able to find a reason to surrender. In their mistaken belief that American friendliness to the only democracy in the Middle East that shares Judeo-Christian values with the West, all of the proponents of inaction will give Islam and the Arabs a victory over Israel, a victory that will only whet their appetite for further Jihad against the West.
Every killing in the name of Islam only further convinces these barbarians that it is the will of their god that they prevail. When the World Trade Center’s twin towers collapsed and crumbled, Muslims everywhere saw it as a sign that their god had rewarded them. They cannot be appeased, not even with the sacrifice of Israel’s existence and, let us not forget, the simultaneous loss of Christianity’s holiest sites, including the birthplace of Jesus.
When the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan and moved into Pakistan, they immediately destroyed all symbols of other religions as quickly and completely as possible. If Muslims captured Israeli land, they would first deny access to, and then destroy, all loci of Christianity just as certainly. If Saddam succeeded in nuking Israel, it would not affect Mecca or Medina, so that, too, would be just as acceptable (even preferable) to the Muslims as conquering Israel slowly via the unsubtle mechanism of a “Palestinian” state.
The true purpose of the new doves of 2002 is so obvious and so predictable. The usual proponents of inaction have been joined by people who know only too well what horrific consequences this inaction will enable, but who accept these consequences for personal or political reasons that they would never publicly admit and are nothing less than shameful.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”