Posted on 03/26/2003 5:02:47 AM PST by JohnHuang2
Novak may be wrong, but hes a true patriot
When a nation is at war, theres 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 Bushs 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 doesnt 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 wont 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.
Its perfectly true that, for self-serving reasons, some of Bushs political critics might today be overstating their enthusiasm for the mission on which our troops are embarked. But they are supporting them and thats 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, Ive never believed that men and women of good will couldnt disagree either on the threat posed by todays 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.
Whats 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 wont 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 cant 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 nations most respected conservative columnists marks the man as neither conservative nor intellectually respectable. Like many other conservatives, I happen to disagree with Novaks analysis of whats going on in the Middle East. But to suggest, as does Frum, that his disagreement with Bushs Iraq policy stems from a hatred of the president and the country is scandalously and irresponsibly absurd.
Frum seems to know little of Novaks background or history, but anyone who can read a newspaper should know that Novak was opposing this nations enemies before Frum was even born. One can question the mans 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.
Secondly, Novak only cares about capital gains tax cuts, and anything anti Israel. The difference between him and Buchanan is that Buchanan would rather support the PLO before capital gains tax cuts, while Novak is more of a moderate. Novak has always had an affinity for the strong man dictatorships of the world, especially in the middle east. If you have ever heard him discussing the middle east, you know this to be a fact.
Thirdly, they are both irrelevent now. Nobody wants to listen to them anymore so they aren't getting their mugs on camera as much as they used to in the past. That is all.
Can you please offer me some proof as I for one have watched Novak be a lifelong republican who hates "rats".
I don't trust Novak at all and Frum has offered me no reason NOT to trust him.
Reaction to last weeks 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 dont 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. Thats 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 Decters 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 yesterdays 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, theres 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 latters s disagreement with Bushs 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 wont 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 MacDonalds 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 presidents 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.
Lets 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 years end, he was saying on television that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter. This is something beyond mere dissent. David Keene concluded his piece with the observation that Robert Novak was opposing this nations 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.
...who just happened to sit on the Board of YAF?
Your ignorance is appalling.
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