Posted on 10/29/2003 6:02:16 AM PST by SJackson
On September 11, 2001, I forced myself to stop hating the president.
My complaints against George W. Bush were the usual ones. He lost the popular vote, he mangles the English language, he's incurious about the world, and he's just too conservative. Yet he's a bleeding heart liberal next to Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. He also stood between Osama bin Laden and the rest of us. We were suddenly at war, and Republicans weren't the enemy.
Most of us felt the same way. For a short little while, America was united. The country felt like a family.
Two years later Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle gets no more hugs from the president. A sense of normalcy is back, and we feel less terrorized. Though the 1990s are over and it's folly to try to return, that doesn't get in the way of our partisans.
"The Enemy Here Is George Bush"
Last month at a Democratic Party debate Howard Dean said "we need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush." This was during an argument with Dick Gephardt about Medicare. At the same time, the mullahs in Iran and the Stalinist tyrant in North Korea were firing up nuclear weapons programs. Al Qaeda threatens to use whatever nukes they can find to turn the United States into a "sea of deadly radiation." At a time like this, calling George Bush the enemy is more than a little ridiculous.
Though politics used to stop at the water's edge, foreign affairs is where the real fight is these days. In the heated days of the war in Iraq, the streets of urban America thronged with tens of thousands of activists, some opposed to regime-change and others supporting our troops.
Except for near the end of the Vietnam War, it wasn't always this way.
Throughout most of the 20th Century, the mainstream left and the mainstream right were in basic agreement about fascism and communism. Both were the enemy, and both were to be fought. So obvious were these evils that we allied ourselves with some sinister regimes along the way.
Liberals sided with communists against fascists. And conservatives sided with fascists against communists. This we did without apology. The Roosevelt administration reintroduced Joseph Stalin as heroic "Uncle Joe" in the Allied fight against Hitler. Ronald Reagan dubbed the genocidal but anti-communist Guatemalan dictator Efraín Rios Montt "a man of great personal integrity" who got "a bum rap on human rights."
The alliances were tactical, the propaganda calculated. It's instructive nevertheless. If liberals could team up with Stalin, of all people, working with George W. Bush against Middle Eastern tyrants should not be a problem. And putting aside partisanship should cut both ways: If Nixon and Reagan could prop up Latin American military regimes, surely the GOP can do business with Hillary Clinton.
The Crucial Alliance
It's a Democratic party cliché now that America needs allies in the Terror War. Of course this is true. We really do need the help of our friends, especially our allies in NATO. But the most crucial alliance of all is the one here at home. If Bush needs the support of Germany and France, he needs the support of the Democrats even more. We can hardly expect other nations to stand with us if we can't even stand with ourselves.
This isn't to say that the party out of power ought to be rubber-stampers. Excessive bipartisanship is the functional equivalent of a one-party state. What we need is an implicit understanding that despite our disagreements we are on the same side. Because we are on the same side. Murderous fanatics are trying to kill us. Save the talk of "enemies" and "evil" for them.
Dissent is the responsibility of the opposition. But this responsibility must be wielded responsibly. Those who argued that regime-change in Iraq would make us more vulnerable to terrorism were misguided, in my view, but were sincerely trying to help. The same goes for those who say we need to send in more troops. Some responsible critics supported the war, while others did not. What unites them is the hope that we'll win. That's the sort of opposition we need.
The Aussie Example
But the increasing polarization of late lays the groundwork for something dangerous. If you demonize your opponent, if you truly believe him venal and wicked and treacherous, the trust as the basis for civil society cracks. Terrorists can then pry open those cracks into chasms.
It happened last year in Australia. After the terror attack at a nightclub in Bali, disturbing letters appeared in the Melbourne Age.
"Prime Minister, I blame you. -- Judith Maher"
"We are paying in blood for John Howard's arse-licking, ignorance and xenophobic bigotry. -- Bob Ellis"
"I explicitly place the responsibility at the feet of Howard and Downer. They may as well have pushed the button themselves. -- Fraser Nock"
Four years ago during the war in Yugoslavia House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said "The bombing was a mistake." He demanded president Clinton negotiate a "diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed policy." The policy wasn't a failure. It just wasn't finished yet. Tom DeLay is not a pacifist. But he would have halted an unfinished war in its tracks and made it a failure on purpose, just to destroy a hated president.
Now that we have a new man in the White House, some Democrats have decided to behave the same way. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) proposes an immediate US retreat from Iraq. Stabilizing and democratizing Iraq is far more important than the intervention in the Balkans. Fighting back in the Terror War is not optional, and most honest brokers will admit that Iraq is one lynchpin within that war. But that doesn't stop Dennis Kucinich. He'll let Iraq fall apart and grant a victory to terrorists as long as it helps take down president Bush.
More than 2,000 years ago in The Art of War Sun Tzu told how to defeat an enemy's leadership. "When he is united, divide him." The lesson here is reversible. We cannot let ourselves become divided. We cannot let the crucial alliance be shattered.
Michael J. Totten writes from Portland, Oregon. Visit his Web log at http://michaeltotten.com.
We were one, we were in shock together, we finally understood a new and horrific reality together and we all got behind the drive to defeat this enemy where he lives.
This was an unbearable event-this oneness, this family that is our nation bound by geography and belief in freedom, bound by foundations that to this day resound a clarity of dignity and independence, to certain people who understand that the only way to win is to divide and couquer.
hillary klinton, only days after 9/11 held a headline from a newspaper up on the floor of our very senate that proclaimed "BUSH KNEW". (And she spoke to this headline, saying our President knew that horrific 9/11 attack was going to happen, insinuating that he LET it happen. Just disgusting. Imagine anyone doing that. But especially a senator. And especially THAT senator-whose own husband had neglected the threat of terror with saxophonic glee.)
In this one extremely hurtful and insidious act...she helped energize and mobilize those who fight to keep us divided along every line possible, knowing that to destroy trust in our leader would help those, who like herself, put party above their nation's security and welfare.
I will never forget hillary's actions that day. Ever. And I hope I have the opportunity someday, to tell her this to her face.
I know, fat chance.
You bet! I've got a Bush Campaign meeting this evening in fact!
Oh, and a minor correction...Hillary held that paper up all right but I don't think it was days after 9/11. I think it was the following Spring when she did that. Either way, the point is the same.
No kidding! Or even the scale of attacks on that day itself.
This guy has no clue does he. Obviously he is incapable of seeing the implacable evil that he associates himself with. They let the entire world see what they are made of at the Wellstone funeral, and in the 2000 election, I guess this guy didn't get it.
We are not on the same side any longer, we are at the threshold of civil war against the enemy within. To equate the moral stance that Tom DeLay took against the war in the Balkins, a man that had the moral insight to know we had entered this war on the wrong side, with radical muslims and against our allies to appease France, with the obstructionism and treason that demoncrats are committing against, not only Bush, but the citizens of the United States as they make everything a partisan traitorous issue, means that this man's moral equivalency has finally gotten the best of him. He is not capable of discerning between good and evil, right and wrong.
It is all a game to them, one they must win even to the point of risking the destruction of the nation. They cannot even grasp the idea that DeLay took that action because of a real moral stand and was not playing politics. I despise them, we cannot survive with them in our midsts.
He's coming around. I've heard it's a slow process.
Howard Dean said "we need to remember that the enemy here is George Bush."
How do you unite with people who say(and really believe) things like this? This is not your fathers democrat party, and it saddens me to say that. I'm trying to think of any one in the leadership of the democrat party that I'd trust in power for more that 8 sec.
Isn't there a saying about leaving the dance with the one you brought? Forget France and Belgium, wait till Germany changes regiemes. They're not friends, and they're not going to support us under any reasonable circumstances.
Confront it. I don't think America believes that and it can be used for political advantage. But the time to do it is now, when GWB can paint the dem9 with it, not next summer when it's last years (and maybe the wrong candidates) news. I'm not sure the "people" are disunited at all. You're reacting to the unity of the far left faction of the dems.
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern!
I had another F-word in mind. and it's not foie-gras.
Dissent is the responsibility of the opposition. But this responsibility must be wielded responsibly. Those who argued that regime-change in Iraq would make us more vulnerable to terrorism were misguided, in my view, but were sincerely trying to help. The same goes for those who say we need to send in more troops. Some responsible critics supported the war, while others did not. What unites them is the hope that we'll win. That's the sort of opposition we need.
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Regards,
TS
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