Robert Novak: Wrong, But Still a Patriot: David Frum's analysis of Bob Novak went too far

When a nation is at war, there’s a tendency among those who support it to suspect that those who opposed it before the shooting started did so either because they were secretly biased in favor of the enemy or have somehow come to hate their own country. There is a corollary tendency among those who opposed war before it actually breaks out to rally round the troops, regardless of their real feelings about its wisdom.

These tendencies are human and rational. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (S.D.), for example, who was attacking President Bush’s competence, judgment and motives before U.S. forces crossed the Iraqi border, was all over the place afterwards, assuring us that he supports the troops and prays for victory. Pat Buchanan, who attacked Bush and his strategists, has done the same thing, as has conservative columnist Robert Novak.

This doesn’t mean that any of them feel any differently about the wisdom of the war today than they did before Bush “pulled the trigger” last week or that once the shooting stops they won’t reiterate the objections they had voiced beforehand. Indeed, if they felt as strongly before the war as they all suggested, it would be dishonest to do anything else later. That does not, however, make illegitimate the position they now take.

It’s perfectly true that, for self-serving reasons, some of Bush’s political critics might today be overstating their enthusiasm for the mission on which our troops are embarked. But they are supporting them and that’s important. They are not in the streets with protesters likening Bush to Hitler or echoing the anti-Semitism of those who actually do seem to think saving “uncle” Saddam is preferable to protecting ourselves and our friends in the region from whatever lunacy he might come up with next week or next month.

While I count myself among those who from the beginning have believed the action we are now taking is fully justified, I’ve never believed that men and women of good will couldn’t disagree either on the threat posed by today’s Iraq or the proper way to deal with it. Those who questioned the strength of the evidence that Saddam had either the weapons we suspected he had or his ability to truly threaten us with them had a point. It looks as if they were wrong, but the early public evidence could lead one to the conclusion they drew from it.

What’s more, those who were concerned about the United States taking on a job that could weaken us internally and lead to a fatal over-extension abroad had and continue to have an even better point. We may be moving into Iraq seeking to disarm an enemy and, incidentally, free her people, but there are those in and out of the administration who would have us stay to appoint quasi-colonial military or civilian governors to build a new Iraq. It is thus that liberators become empire builders and should, in my opinion, be resisted by thoughtful conservatives.

The debate over whether we should have adopted the policy we are now pursuing was a legitimate one and the continuing debate about what all this will mean in the post-Saddam world is going to prove to be even more important. It is a debate that won’t divide us all along neat ideological lines, but it is one that must nonetheless be joined.

And it is going to be far too important to be decided on the basis of the sort of ad hominem attacks launched against Novak this week by former White House speechwriter David Frum. Frum is among those who can’t seem to accept the fact that those who disagree with him may not be in league with the devil. His vituperative attack on one of the nation’s most respected conservative columnists marks the man as neither conservative nor intellectually respectable. Like many other conservatives, I happen to disagree with Novak’s analysis of what’s going on in the Middle East. But to suggest, as does Frum, that his disagreement with Bush’s Iraq policy stems from a hatred of the president and the country is scandalously and irresponsibly absurd.

Frum seems to know little of Novak’s background or history, but anyone who can read a newspaper should know that Novak was opposing this nation’s enemies before Frum was even born. One can question the man’s judgment and sometimes even his facts, but to suggest that Novak is no different from the crypto-fascists and Marxists organizing “peace” rallies these days says a lot more about David Frum than it does about Bob Novak.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental affairs firm.

Read this piece this morning from a fellow Yalie of Frums, JP Zmirak:

...You see, Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy. He also made certain to assert over and over again that he was a fiscal conservative but a social liberal.

This was a crucial point, on a campus where liberal social attitudes were taken utterly for granted, and very few students dared to speak against them. For those who did, "social suicide" doesn’t begin to describe what they'd done to themselves. The few undergrads who advocated traditional Christian values made themselves almost radioactive. Shunned and loathed, they would eat alone, or in tiny groups of fellow thinkers, in the cavernous Gothic dining halls, as if they’d contracted some contagious, incurable skin disease. (And no, they didn’t get to date much.)

As if to publicly proclaim his distance from the misfits who were so despised, Frum led a public campaign to close down a conservative literary magazine, The Yale Lit, because – well, because "he couldn’t stand that type of conservative," as he told a friend. Enlisting student opinion, and the Yale administration’s help, Frum succeeded in quashing an exquisitely edited, beautifully produced student magazine, which was promptly replaced, under the same name, by a fourth-rate broadsheet that printed students’ trashy, confessional poems about their drug experiences and tentative erotic fumblings. Frum’s first purge of right-wing opinion was accomplished.

No ostracism for David. He went from Yale to swim among the suits at The Wall Street Journal, and write a number of mildly interesting books, en route to rising smoothly through the ranks of what was by now called "neoconservatism." He really "arrived" (or "made it" in the sense of Norman Podhoretz in his revealing, appalling autobiography) when his commentaries began to appear on that bastion of respectable opinion, National Public Radio. I listened to many of them, and found them witty. Also troubling – since their purpose was clear: To explain to America’s liberal intelligentsia why they shouldn’t be afraid of Republicans.

These urbane, chatty contributions all centered on one theme: That the social issues the Republican party had adopted were simply red meat for the rubes. They would never go anywhere, and shouldn’t stop people from voting for lower marginal tax rates and a "strong" foreign policy. Again and again Frum would patiently explain how the gestures made by the likes of Newt Gingrich, George Bush I, and Robert Dole to appease the Religious Right, the Southerners, the libertarians, and the "gun people" in their party were simply that – hollow, symbolic tips of the cowboy hat to the hapless activists whom they needed to keep in line. Cheap pizza bought for the "3:00 am" types who leave their trailer parks to volunteer at Republican phone banks. His wink was almost audible. Those people were never going to get what they wanted – any more than black voters really benefit from electing Democrats. But the rabble must be appeased. No wonder Frum got a job writing speeches for a Republican administration.

Frum's response to this, from NRO:

Reaction to last week’s NR story on paleo continues to be heard. Two pieces that appeared yesterday seem to me to require some comment.

One of them appeared on the Lew Rockwell site by a writer named John Zmirak, who suggests that the secret of my politics is that I am a “fiscal conservative but a social liberal.” He does not support this point with any quotations or citations – for the very good reason that there are none to be found. In fact, the record shows exactly the opposite: that I began arguing the conservative case on issues like the defense of the traditional family from the time I began writing about politics in the early 1980s. Nobody is going to be much interested in reading through back issues of the Yale Daily News. But if interested in my background on these issues, readers might wish to take a look at my debate with Andrew Sullivan over gay rights in Slate in 1997, among many, many other examples.

The larger point is this: I don’t personally regard myself as a “neoconservative.” (The term seems to me to describe that generation of writers and thinkers who began as anti-communist liberals and moved right in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not my biography.) Nevertheless, it was social issues – crime, urban disorder, the turn from civil rights to racial quotas, the attack on the family – fully as much as foreign-policy debates that transformed the hawkish liberals of the 1950s into neoconservatives in the 1970s.

Midge Decter’s classic essay, “The Boys on the Beach” – a critique of the homosexual lifestyle and culture of the 1970s – appeared in Commentary all the way back in 1980, before anybody had ever heard of such a thing as a “paleoconservative.” William Bennett and Terry Eastland published the first prophetic attack on affirmative action, Counting By Race, in 1979 – and then refused to institute quotas at the National Endowment for the Humanities when he was appointed chairman in 1981. Irving Kristol denounced Roe v. Wade the instant the decision was handed down. And so on and on. Whatever else the dispute with the paleos concerns, it isn't traditional morality.

A second negative comment on my piece comes from David Keene of the American Conservative Union in yesterday’s edition of The Hill, a newspaper about Congress now being excitingly transformed by new editor Hugo Gurdon.

Keene claims that “When a nation is at war, there’s a tendency among those who support it to suspect that those who opposed it before the shooting started did so either because they were secretly biased in favor of the enemy or have somehow come to hate their own country.” And he goes on to argue that I have irresponsibly besmirched Robert Novak merely because of the latter’s s “disagreement with Bush’s Iraq policy.”

I suppose one of the dangers of writing a 7,000 word piece is that you run the risk that busy people – and Keene is one of the busiest conservatives in Washington – won’t have time to read it very carefully. So let me restate for the record: I did not criticize the antiwar conservatives I discussed in NR for mere opposition to the president's Iraq policy. In fact, I explicitly praised those conservatives who questioned that policy for their valuable contributions to public debate:

“Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?”

I meant those words sincerely. In the very same issue of NR I also had a back-page column lavishly praising Heather MacDonald’s new book about policing – and Heather is an opponent of the Iraq war, which she regards as unwise and distracting.

It was not for disagreeing with the president’s Iraq policy that I criticized antiwar conservatives like Robert Novak and Patrick Buchanan (whom I note David Keene does not defend), but for succumbing to paranoid and anti-semitic explanations of that policy – a paranoia which led some of them, including Novak, to move to direct and indirect opposition to the Afghan campaign as well.

Let’s remember: The very day after the terrorist attacks, Novak was already writing his first column pinning the blame for the atrocity on Israel. On September 17, 2001, he alleged that the administration would never find bin Laden and would instead attempt “to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” By year’s end, he was saying on television that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This is something beyond mere dissent. David Keene concluded his piece with the observation that “Robert Novak was opposing this nation’s enemies before David Frum was even born.” That is true. Which makes it all the more disturbing that Novak has been so unwilling to live up to his own past record in the 18 months since 9/11.

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