No, most of those folks get what this argument is really all about: Buchanan is endeavoring to lay a historical foundation for his paleo-conservative or libertarian (take your pick) opposition to any projection of American military power specifically in Iraq and more generally in support of the interests of Israel. He is being clever in trying to establish this predicate without tipping his hand about where he is going: If we cannot judge that we accomplished our war aims in America's holy war, how can we justify war in Iraq? These wars always go awry and should not be mounted. If we cannot accomplish predictable results in a war where the moral issues were clear how can we hope to do so in Iraq? If we cannot achieve war aims on our own behalf, how can we justify a war on behalf of Israel?
Buchanan's critics know where the game is going and want to head him off at the pass. They cannot concede that war accomplishes nothing and is not worth waging if you believe America is under threat of mass murder by suicide dealt weapons of mass destruction. I am in this camp. Others want to deploy American power in behalf of Israel - or at least Buchanan thinks they do.
Neither side is ready to come clean with the reader and admit this argument is really a proxy for our policy in Afghanistan and Iraq as crafted by neo-conservatives and that Poland is a figure for Israel. As a result we get these kinds of discussions:
On what basis? Were gulags worse than Auschwitz? Was the Katyan Forest worse than the slaughter of 100,000 Kiev Jews at Bari Yar? Were the deaths of several million Ukrainians worse than the Holocaust? Admittedly, in the century past, the Communists racked up a higher body count. But they had 70 years to work on it (in the case of China, North Korea and Cuba, it’s an on-going project), compared to the 12-year Reich.
Perhaps Pat has a magical calculator for figuring the sum of oppression, torture, and mass murder. I don’t know how he reached his conclusion, unless – as I suspect – he cares about the victims of the Red terror but is blasé about graves dug by the Swastika.
Now we all know what we are arguing about and we can stop trying to jigger history to fit our respective templates.
