War critics are 'miserable creatures'
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE (Link to Story)
November 14, 2003
 |
Joseph Perkins |
'War," wrote John Stuart Mill, one of the 19th century's greatest thinkers, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight," Mill continued, "is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
That brings to mind the anti-war crowd – those stumping for the Democratic presidential nomination, those opining on the nation's liberal editorial pages, and those protesting on the streets of the nation's capital and other cities throughout the fair land.
They are, in Mill's words, miserable creatures. They think nothing is worth war, not even the mass murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow countrymen (and women and children) on Sept. 11, 2001.
They have nothing for which they are willing to fight, not even to prevent a madman like Saddam Hussein from developing or acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with which he could one day threaten the United States or her allies.
Those in the anti-war crowd perfunctorily profess their support for American military personnel fighting on their unworthy behalf in Iraq. Yet, they derive a certain perverse satisfaction, it seems, with every fresh news report of a truck bombing, a helicopter crash, a suicide attack. To their minds, those setbacks vindicate their opposition to the war before, during and after the fall of Hussein's regime. They see it as the realization of their dire predictions that the war in Iraq would become a quagmire of Vietnam-like proportions.
Of course, the comparisons are absurd.
For one thing, the United States never managed to turn the Communists out of power in Vietnam, whereas Saddam's regime has been ousted in Iraq, most of its high-ranking officials either killed or apprehended.
And the United States suffered more than 58,000 fatalities in Vietnam, some 47,369 of which were combat-related. That's nearly 1,500 percent more fatalities than the United States has suffered in Iraq.
That's not to diminish in any way the loss of the nearly 400 heroic American servicemen and women who have fought and died in Iraq. But the numbers ought to be put into perspective. For the reality is, more Americans have been killed in Los Angeles alone this year than have been killed in Iraq.
The opposition to the war in Iraq is less about principle – on the parts of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, the liberal opinion page writers, the anti-war street protesters – than it is about politics.
For the politicos and journalistas and activists who were bitter about the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, who have never stopped hating George W. Bush, are the same miserable creatures who are so loudly decrying the postwar campaign in Iraq.
They almost don't care if the postwar reconstruction in Iraq fails, if Saddam returns to power, if the Iraqi people are once again subject to his genocidal rule, so long as they can play the Iraq card against Bush.
Indeed, just last week, a secret strategy memo, prepared by Democratic staff on the supposedly nonpartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested that Democrats ought to launch an investigation of the White House next year to have maximum impact on the presidential election.
Even some Democrats, those who support their country and their president during time of war, were outraged. "If what has happened here is not treason," said Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., "it is its first cousin."
Then there are the Bush-hating opinion writers – and they know who they are – who insinuate that the commander in chief has somehow lost the peace in Iraq because he supposedly neglected to consider an "exit strategy."
Of course, the exit strategy those journalistas have in mind is to have the United States cut and run in Iraq, after only nine months on the ground, turning over postwar reconstruction to the feckless United Nations.
That would be viewed as a victory by Saddam loyalists, by al-Qaeda and other terrorist operatives in Iraq, who continue to mount their guerrilla attacks against U.S. and coalition targets, anticipating that the attacks will lead to the very calls we hear now from liberal, Bush-bashing opinion writers that U.S. troops be withdrawn.
Finally, there are the rank-and-file anti-war protesters, the "useful idiots" as Lenin famously referred to them. Some 10,000 of them marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., last month, carrying such banners as "End the Occupation of Iraq."
The anti-war protest was co-sponsored by a far-left outfit that calls itself ANSWER, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism. ANSWER is a front group for the Workers World Party, which promotes socialist revolution.
When ANSWER activists are not busy advocating United States surrender to Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda terrorists, they are raising funds for their campaign to impeach President Bush.
The opponents of the Iraq war, the knee-jerk critics of the postwar reconstruction, reveal the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling of which Mill wrote nearly two centuries ago.
Their opposition, their criticism is fueled not so much by reason, but by hatred – toward their president or toward their country.
Perkins can be reached via e-mail at joseph.perkins@uniontrib.com