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A return of 60's Anti-Americanism and Hippies?
AEI Dinner speech ^

Posted on 03/08/2002 3:42:52 PM PST by KantianBurke

America at War: “The One Thing Needful”

Norman Podhoretz

Francis Boyer Lecture

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Annual Dinner

February 13, 2002

Washington, D.C.

It is now almost exactly five months since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the question I want to explore tonight is whether 9/11 hurled us into a new era of American history.

Certainly, this is how it seemed. The most obvious symptom was that once again we were saluting our now ubiquitously displayed flag. This was the very flag that, not so long ago, leftist radicals had thought fit only for burning. Yet now, even on the old flag-burning Left, a few prominent personalities were painfully wrenching their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute.

Contemplating these people, I was reminded of the response to the suppression by the new Soviet regime of the sailors’ revolt that erupted in Kronstadt in the early 1920’s. Far more murderous horrors would pour out of the malignantly tenebrous recesses of Stalinist rule, but as the first in that long series of atrocities leading to disillusionment with the Soviet Union, Kronstadt became the portent of them all.

Well, 9/11 served as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical Leftists of today. What it did was raise questions about what one of them called their inveterately “negative faith in America the ugly.”

September 11 reminded me, too, of a poem by W. H. Auden, transplanted from London to New York in a trade of poets (they got T. S. Eliot and we got Auden plus a few future draft choices). Auden’s poem, written upon the outbreak of World War Two, was entitled “September 1, 1939.” It contained hostile sentiments about America left over from Auden’s Communist period, but the opening lines are so evocative of September 11, 2001 that it is no wonder they were quoted so often in the early days of this new war:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade.

Auden’s low dishonest decade, of course, was the 1930’s, and its clever hopes centered on the construction of a workers’ paradise in the Soviet Union. Our counterpart was the 1960’s, and its less clever hopes centered not on construction, however illusory, but on destruction—the destruction of the institutions that made up the American way of life. For America was conceived as the great obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the wretched of the earth, not least those within its own borders.

Now, I recognize that, as James Q. Wilson has recently reminded us, the Sixties are not an all-purpose explanation of everything that has gone wrong with this country since then. And where the hostility of American intellectuals toward America is concerned, I myself have traced it back to the period following the Civil War. Nevertheless, I am far from alone in my conviction that the radical movement of the Sixties was the proximate source of the “negative faith in America the ugly” to which so many were converted both during and after that period.

Because to me, the new patriotic mood represented a return to greater sanity and health, I fervently hoped that it would last. But I want to tell a story that will explain why I could not fully share the heady confidence of some of my political friends that this was a permanent and not an ephemeral change.

One day in the year 1960, I was invited to address a meeting of left-wing radicals. For my sins—sins of which I have been repenting for more than three decades by now—I was a leading member of this then tiny movement. The main issue around which it had first begun to coalesce was nuclear disarmament. But the subject on which I had been asked to speak was a new one that had barely begun to show the whites of its eyes. It was the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place of which we knew little—a place called Vietnam.

Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary magazine, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the fifty or so people in the audience, and whispered to me: “Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?”

Marion Magid’s quip brings back to life some sense of how unpromising a future there promised to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that the these young people, and the generation about to descend politically and culturally from them, would within the blink of a historical eye be hailed as “the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known.” These words, incredibly, would emanate from what the new movement regarded as the very belly of the beast: from, to be specific, the mouth of Archibald Cox, a professor at the Harvard Law School and later Solicitor General of the United States. Similar encomia would also ooze unctuously out of parents, teachers, clergymen, artists, and journalists.

More incredible yet, the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would within a mere ten years turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that we would “pay any price, bear any burden,” and so on, “to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” By 1972, George McGovern, nominated for President by Kennedy’s own party, was campaigning on the slogan, “Come Home, America.” It was a slogan that almost perfectly reflected the ethos of the embryonic movement that I had addressed in Union Square only about a decade before.

But the pathetic impression my audience made on Marion Magid does not begin to explain why such a development would have struck anyone present that night as so unlikely.

For the new movement was bucking a national consensus that came close to being universal. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman, recognizing a threat from Soviet expansionism, had embraced the policy of containment to deal with it. A year later, running for reelection, Truman had fended off challenges both from his Right, which regarded containment as—in Richard Nixon’s term—“cowardly,” and from his Left, to which the same strategy amounted to warmongering.

Truman’s victory, then, signified the coming together of the nation behind his foreign policy. But there was also a wider dimension to this emergent political consensus, and it was beautifully captured in a historic essay of 1947 by George F. Kennan. Much later Kennan would deny that he had said what he said in that essay, what everyone at the time thought he had said, and what rereading the essay clearly demonstrates that he had in fact said. To wit:

The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

In “pulling themselves together” precisely for these reasons and in precisely this way, the American people were rewarded with a surge of self-confident energy. But the effect on the country’s intellectuals was even more extraordinary. Many of them had only recently gloried in their “alienation” from American society. Now they too joined, often to their own astonishment, in what the few remaining socialists among them petulantly derided as the “American celebration.”

Yet this did not result in the loss of creative power smugly predicted by these dissenters. On the contrary: the rediscovery by the formerly alienated of what Mary McCarthy, one of their brightest young stars, did not shrink from calling “America the Beautiful,” gave rise to a richer high culture than the Thirties before it or the Sixties that followed. I am thinking of the emergence in the Fifties of a host of figures who shared in the newly positive attitude toward American society: novelists like Saul Bellow; poets like Robert Lowell; critics like Lionel Trilling; philosophers like Hannah Arendt; theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr; political analysts like George Kennan himself.

In going over this familiar ground, I am trying to make two points. One is that the nascent radical movement of the late Fifties and early Sixties was up against an adversary that looked unassailable. Even so—and here is my second point—to the bewilderment of almost everyone, not least the radicals themselves, they blew and they blew and they blew the house down. And even some of the rediscoverers of “America the Beautiful,” including Mary McCarthy, did another 180-degree pirouette and contributed a bit of emphysemic blowing themselves.

Here we had a major turning point that slipped in under the radar of virtually all the pundits and the trend-spotters. How well I remember the late John Roche, a political scientist then working in the Johnson White House, being quoted by Jimmy Breslin as having dismissed the radicals as a bunch of “upper West Side jackal bins.” Jackal bins? What were jackal bins? As further investigation disclosed, Roche had said “Jacobins,” a word evidently so unfamiliar to his interviewer that “jackal bins” was the best he could do with it in transcribing his notes.

Much ink has been spilled, a few gallons of it by me, in the struggle to explain how and why a great “Establishment” representing so wide a national consensus could have been toppled so easily and so quickly by so small and marginal a group as these “jackal bins.” In the domain of foreign affairs, the usual answer is the subject of my talk that night in Union Square: Vietnam. In this view, it was by deciding to fight an unpopular war that the Establishment rendered itself vulnerable.

But the problem is that Vietnam was a popular war. At the beginning, all the major media—from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from Time to Newsweek, from CBS to ABC—supported our intervention. So did most of the professoriate. And so did the public. No matter. Even when all but one or two of the people who had either directly led us into Vietnam, or applauded our intervention, commenced falling all over themselves as they scampered to the head of the antiwar parade, public opinion continued supporting the war. But public opinion had ceased to count. Indeed, even reality itself had ceased to count. Consider the Tet offensive of 1968. It was, as all now agree and some vainly struggled to insist then, a crushing defeat for the Communists. But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a defeat for us on the CBS Evening News, and a defeat it became.

Admittedly, in electoral politics, where numbers are decisive, public opinion remained potent. None of the doves contending for the presidency in 1968 or 1972 could beat Richard Nixon. But even Nixon felt it necessary to claim that he had a plan for getting us out of Vietnam.

In other words, on Vietnam, elite opinion trumped popular opinion. But its effects were not restricted to foreign policy. They extended into a newly antagonistic attitude toward America that ranged from skepticism about our character and intentions to outright hatred of everything we were and represented.

It hardly needs stressing that this attitude found a home in—to round up the usual suspects—the world of the arts, the universities, and the major media of news and entertainment, where intellectuals shaped by the Sixties, and their acolytes in the publishing houses of New York and in the studios of Hollywood, held sway.

But it would be a serious mistake to suppose that the trickle-down effect of the professoriate’s attitude was confined to literature, journalism, and show business. John Maynard Keynes once said that “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But practical functionaries like bureaucrats and administrators were subject to the same rule, though they tended to be the slaves not of economists but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who were very much alive even when their ideas had, or should have, become defunct.

It was by no means necessary for the practical men to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of the authors of those works. All they had to do was read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies—and drip by insidious drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material would be absorbed into their heads and their nervous systems.

These, in sum, are some of the factors that make me wonder whether September 11, 2001 will have turned out to mark a genuine turning point comparable to December 7, 1941. I was not quite twelve years old when President Roosevelt declared war right after Pearl Harbor, but I remember the period well, and I cannot recall so much as a peep of protest out of the isolationists who had previously opposed our entry into that great conflict. And it was in order to learn better how to defeat the enemy, not to love or justify him, that the Germans and the Japanese now became more intensive subjects of study.

Now here we are in the early days of another war that may well be supported by an even larger percentage of the public than Vietnam was at the beginning. Today, however, the numerically insignificant opposition is stronger than it was in the early days of Vietnam. The reason is that it now maintains a tight grip over the institutions that had been surrendered to the anti-American Left by the end of the 60’s.

Take, for a start, the literary community, which can stand in for the world of the arts in general. No sooner had the Twin Towers been toppled and the Pentagon smashed than a fierce competition began for the gold in the anti-American Olympics. Or perhaps the race was with Osama bin Laden for the Nobel Peace Prize. (After all, if that prize could be given to the contemporary godfather of terrorism, Yasser Arafat, why not to Bin Laden?)

One of my old ex-friends, Susan Sontag, seized an early lead in this contest with a piece in The New Yorker, in which she asserted that 9/11 was an attack “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.” Not content with that, she went on to compare the congressional expressions of support for what she characterized as our “robotic President” to “the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress.”

But another of my old ex-friends, Norman Mailer, who had been uncharacteristically slow out of the starting gate, soon came up strong on the inside by comparing the Twin Towers to “two huge buck teeth,” and pronouncing the ruins at Ground Zero “more beautiful than the buildings were.” Still playing the enfant terrible even as he was closing in on his eightieth year to heaven, Mailer gathered steam in denouncing us as “cultural oppressors and aesthetic oppressors” of the Third World. And in what did this oppression consist? It consisted, he expatiated, in our establishing “enclaves of our food out there, like McDonald’s” and in putting “our high-rise buildings” in around the airports of even “the meanest, scummiest, capital[s] in the world.”

So much for the literary community. Then there was the campus, to which I am tempted to apply Hamlet’s words: “Fie on it! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,/ That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.” A report issued shortly after 9/11 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA—whose founding chairman was Lynne V. Cheney—cited about a hundred malodorous statements wafting out of campuses all over the country that resembled Sontag and Mailer in blaming the attacks not on the terrorists but on America.

I realize that the stench emitted from the groves of academe has long since penetrated into all our nostrils. But I think another whiff would sharpen our sense of the noxious weeds still flourishing there that could, under the right circumstances, grow to a truly monstrous size. Here, then, are three typical samples:

From a professor at the University of New Mexico: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.”

From a professor at Rutgers: “[We] should be aware that the ultimate cause [of 9/11] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.”

And from a professor at the University of Massachusetts: “[The American flag] is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.”

When the ACTA report was issued, cries of “McCarthyism”—that first refuge of a left-wing scoundrel—were heard throughout the land. A New York Times editorial later chimed in with the epithet “repugnant.” Yet what repelled the Times about the report was not statements like the ones I have just cited. It was that ACTA, had “attacked dozens of professors for having reacted to the terrorist attacks in ways its authors considered inappropriate.”

Inappropriate! One could scarcely find a better current illustration of what George Orwell meant when he wrote in 1946 that “In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” And I cannot resist revisiting Orwell’s much-circulated crack about a comparably demented piece of anti-American vitriol that a leftist British intellectual spewed out during World War Two: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” said Orwell; “no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But much as I revere Orwell, I prefer a homelier version of the same crack, whose author was the aunt of Saul Bellow. After overhearing a passionate ideological dispute around her own kitchen table between the future Nobel laureate for literature and his radical friends from the University of Chicago, she remarked: “Smart, smart, smart…stupid.”

Like the professors in the ACTA report, Susan Sontag, too, claimed that her freedom of speech was being placed in jeopardy. In this peculiar reading of the First Amendment, she is free to say anything she likes, but the right to free speech ends where criticism of what she has said begins.

Actually, with rare exceptions, the only attempts to stifle dissent on the campus were directed at the many students and the few faculty members who supported the 9/11 war. All these attempts could be encapsulated into a single phenomenon: on a number of campuses, students or professors who displayed American flags or patriotic posters were forced to take them down.

As for Susan Sontag’s freedom of speech, I have in my possession a file several inches thick containing transcripts of fawning interviews with her in periodicals and on television programs after her New Yorker piece appeared.

And speaking of television, it was soon inundated with material presenting Islam in the most glowing terms. Mainly, these programs took their cue from the President and other political leaders. Out of the best of motives, and for prudential reasons as well, elected officials were striving mightily to deny that the war against terrorism was a war against Islam. They therefore never ceased heaping praises on the beauties of that religion, about which few of them knew anything.

But it was from the universities, not from the politicians, that the substantive content of the broadcasts derived, in interviews with Muslim academics whose accounts of Islam were—how shall I put it?—selectively roseate. Sometimes they were even downright untruthful, especially in sanitizing the doctrine of jihad or holy war, or in misrepresenting the extent to which leading Muslim clerics all over the world had been celebrating suicide bombers as heroes and martyrs.

I do not bring this up in order to enter into a theological dispute. My purpose, rather, is to offer another case study in the continued workings of the trickle-down effect I have already described. Thus, almost within hours after 9/11, the universities began adding innumerable courses on Islam to their curricula. On the campus, understanding Islam inevitably translated into apologetics for it, and most of the media dutifully followed suit. The media also adopted the stance of neutrality between the terrorists and ourselves that prevailed among the relatively moderate professoriate, as when the major television networks ordered their anchors to avoid exhibiting partisanship.

Here the great exception was the Fox News Channel. The New York Times ran an article deploring the fact that Fox was covering the war from—O the horror! The horror!—a frankly pro-American perspective. But the Times was relieved that no other network had so cavalierly discarded the sacred conventions dictating that journalists, in the words of the president of ABC News, must “maintain their neutrality in times of war.”

It is important to note that a few voices on the Right also blamed America for having been attacked. Speaking on Pat Robertson’s TV program, the Reverend Jerry Falwell delivered himself of the view that God was punishing the United States for the moral decay exemplified by a variety of liberal groups among us. Both later apologized for singling out these groups, but each continued to insist that God was withdrawing His protection from America because all of us had become such great sinners.

On the secular Right, we had the columnist Robert Novak, along with that born-again Coughlinite Pat Buchanan. In the opinion of these two, and others of like mind, it was not our disobedience to divine law but our friendliness toward Israel that had brought this attack upon us. That bin Laden had never been much concerned with the Palestinians made no difference to Buchanan and Novak: they knew better.

For the moment, though, the major fount of the oppositional action remained on the Left, and it was mainly holed up in the universities. There, Eric Foner, a professor of history at my own alma mater, Columbia, was perhaps the most prominent among those who tried to turn the tables on ACTA by risibly condemning it for trying “to enforce a particular party line on American colleges and universities.” Foner also condemned the report as misleading, since the polls proved that there was “firm support” for the war among college students. “If our aim is to indoctrinate students with unpatriotic beliefs,” Foner smirked, “we’re obviously doing a very poor job of it.” Well, we know that parents who shell out $35,000 a year to universities like Columbia are not getting their money’s worth, but in this one perverse respect, at least, we and they can be grateful for it.

Yet even at the height of the radical fevers on the campus in the Sixties, only a minority of students sided with the antiwar radicals. But though they were in the majority, the non-radical students were unable to make themselves heard above the antiwar din, and whenever they tried, they were shouted down. So it was on the campus after 9/11. There were, here and there, brave defiers of the academic orthodoxies. But mostly, the silent majority remained, well, silent, for fear of incurring the disapproval of their teachers, or even punished for such crimes as “insensitivity.”

The confidence in America, and American virtue, that became nearly universal during the Second World War had enough momentum to carry us into the very different war that we waged against Soviet totalitarianism. And it was strong enough to create the consensus I described a while back. But it was not strong enough to withstand the assault upon it I also sketched out some moments ago.

Will the consensus that spontaneously materialized on 9/11 succeed in resisting the similar assault that began being mounted against it within hours by the guerrillas-with-tenure in the universities, along with their spiritual and political disciples scattered throughout other quarters of our culture? Can this “tiny handful of ageing Rip van Winkles,” as they were breezily brushed off by one commentator, grow into a force as powerful as the “jackal bins” of yesteryear?

The answer no doubt depends primarily both on whether—God forbid—we are hit again by terrorists, and on how well the military side of the war will go. Thus, antiwar activity on some campuses was dampened by our mind-boggling success in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the mopping-up operation there created an opportunity for more subtle forms of opposition to gain traction. Complaints began being raised about alleged tramplings of civil liberties here at home, and then about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo.

Though soon shown to be almost entirely baseless and even preposterous, I suppose some people raised these concerns in good faith. But it is also true that such issues could and did serve as a respectable cover for opposition to further military action. This is how it worked during Vietnam, when demonstrably false accusations of war crimes were lodged against certain lawful American military tactics, were uncritically accepted as proved, and were then used as a potent weapon by the antiwar movement.

Be that as it may, of one thing we can be sure: as the war widens, opposition will widen along with it. We could already see this happening after President Bush spoke of an “axis of evil” in his State of the Union speech two weeks ago. In this single image the President brilliantly defined our present enemies as a fusion of those we fought in World War Two with the evil empire we battled in World War Three, which is the name Eliot A. Cohen has rightly suggested we give to the cold war. The President now promised an expansion of the war to regimes that may or may not have been directly involved in 9/11 but whose leaders were preparing to threaten us with weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, he declared that he would if necessary attack them preemptively. And he reiterated that we would prefer to fight with allies, but that if we had to, we would go it alone.

As well we might have to do, given the anger and contempt this wonderfully bold declaration aroused throughout the world. Even the Europeans, after offering us their condolences over 9/11, could scarcely let a decent interval pass before going back into the ancient family business of trying to prove how vastly superior in wisdom and finesse they were to us. Now they mocked the President as “simplistic,” while urging that our military operations end with Afghanistan, and that we leave the rest to diplomacy in deferential consultation with the great masters of that recondite art in Paris and Brussels.

At home, much the same position was expressed by the New York Times and other publications ranging from the Center to the hard Left. In these precincts the President was hit for recklessness and overreaching, while terms redolent of Vietnam like “slippery slope” and “quagmire” were resurrected. Yet unlike the antiwar movement during Vietnam, which was almost completely made up of leftists and liberals, today’s developing opposition resembles the one we had during the run-up to the Gulf War. That is, it is forging a coalition of the hard Left, elements of the soft Left, and sectors of the American Right.

In a pungent foretaste of this bizarre ideological cocktail, Michael Kinsley on the soft Left allied himself with Pat Buchanan on the hard Right in indicting the President for evading the Constitution by proposing to fight undeclared wars. Meanwhile, the same charge was moving into the political mainstream through Democratic Senators like Byrd, along with complaints from Tom Daschle about the concept of an “axis of evil,” from which his advisers only last night persuaded him to retreat somewhat. Only last night, too, Al Gore endorsed the concept, but—like some Republican Senators earlier—he simultaneously endorsed the whining over American “unilateralism” in the chancelleries and chattering classes of Europe. There, it seems, they agree that an axis of evil does actually exist, but it is made up not of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice. Anyhow, all the toing-and-froing by the politicians was accompanied by a thousand reasons as to why the Bush Doctrine in its present form was the wrong way to go.

As this kind of thing metastasizes, a great responsibility will fall upon those of us who stand in awe of the moral courage and the strategic clarity President Bush has increasingly drawn out of his heart and soul and mind and guts since 9/11. We will need to mobilize all our intellectual firepower to fight off the arguments against the Bush Doctrine, and to expose them for what they really are: appeasement and defeatism traveling under other names.

Here an analogy with World War Three may be illuminating. I believe that Ronald Reagan led us into victory in that war by reversing the post-Vietnam decline of American military might and resuming a vigorous ideological struggle against the “evil empire.” For this he too, like President Bush today, was ridiculed as a simpleton and a “cowboy.” Which is why I also believe that no one campaigning on such promises could have been elected in 1979, and then could have prevailed in office over his political foes, if the ground had not been prepared by the neoconservative intellectuals who had for more than ten years been waging a fierce war of ideas against their former colleagues on the Left.

To be sure, the neoconservative contingent was preceded by conservatives to the manner born—and all honor to them. But the neoconservatives constituted a fresh wave of reinforcements. And because they possessed a more intimate fix on the positions of their old political allies, they were able to mount a newly aggressive offensive against the defamation of America by the Left, while effectively revivifying the case for regarding the Soviet Union as, yes, an evil empire.

My contention is that 9/11 will have given rise to a genuine transformation only if, once again, the military forces we deploy are undergirded by an equally formidable intellectual campaign. Maybe the 9/11 Kronstadters will eventually take on this job. So far, however, they seem to be stopping short of a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the assumptions behind their old faith in America the ugly.

Hence, for the time being, if—in a phrase I am borrowing from Matthew Arnold who borrowed it from the Gospel of Luke—“the one thing needful” is to be done, we old soldiers and our younger colleagues will have to do it pretty much on our own. But here is a hot news flash: forty-eight scholars, some of them fellow old soldiers who are with us tonight, have only just issued an open letter supporting the war. Their statement is a very welcome counter to the dogmas on the campus. But it is, I fear, a little too defensive to satisfy the full demands of “the one thing needful.”

What are those demands? To describe them in language I have frequently used before, but that cannot be repeated too often, they are, first, to remind ourselves, and then to teach our woefully miseducated children, that this country enjoys more freedom and more prosperity more widely shared than any nation in the history of the world. It has thereby earned a place for itself among the greatest of all human civilizations.

We need, after dwelling for so long on what may be wrong with us, to remember, and to celebrate, how much more is right and good and noble. We need to realize that the answer to the plaintively asked question “Why do they hate us?” is not for whatever crimes we may have committed, but for our accomplishments and our virtues.

Correlatively, we need to understand more clearly that these accomplishments and virtues have their source in the institutions designed by our Founding Fathers—institutions that have, just as they hoped, conduced to “the preservation of the blessings of liberty” for their posterity. Which is to say, us.

I for one pray that our victory in this war—World War Four—will result in the creation of conditions under which the same blessings can be heaped upon as many countries as possible. And I pray that it will set Islam onto a path of reformation from within. Both Judaism and Christianity began undergoing such a process centuries ago. Why should Islam alone remain forever exempt?

“America! America!”—sang Katharine Lee Bates in 1893—“God shed his grace on thee.” Appealing to God to shed the same grace on the rest of the world can no doubt be taken as a call for American imperialism. I confess that the word imperialism does not frighten me, but since a term like “leadership” would be less incendiary, I will resort to it.

In advocating such leadership by America, I do not make light of the widespread doubts that this country, by its very nature, is endowed either with the will or the skill to play even a benevolently imperial role in the world. But then the cadences of George F. Kennan in 1947 spring reassuringly back into my ears. To my delight, I heard echoes of his words in President Bush’s State of the Union speech, both in how it began and in how it concluded. But Kennan’s more eloquent formulation remains the locus classicus here, and so I want to conclude by quoting it once more, in an updated form as applicable to World War IV as the original was to World War III:

The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

To which, surely, the only fitting response is a very loud and a very resonant Amen.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Front Page News
KEYWORDS: clashofcivilizatio; traitorlist
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To: WarrenC
Podhoretz is simply making the point that the Vietnamese War was a popular intervention which was nonetheless undone by a tiny but determined and critically situated minority

That's BS. When America realized it was a political war and we we were not out to win it did popular opinion change. When it was learned that the US would not bomb Hanoi, Haiphong Harbor, or the Red River dikes the tide changed. The war had no foreseeable end. And day after day body bags came back to America. In '65 or '66 I read an article in the US News and World Reports how the war could be won in 2 weeks (there were many other sources that said the same thing). No it wasn't some small committed vocal minority that turned the tide is was LBJ who promised the war machine a war without victory. Average Joe 6 pack did not liston to the nutzoid commie pinkos rioting and looting that changed his mind about the war, it was the truth.

41 posted on 03/08/2002 11:28:33 PM PST by jwh_Denver
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To: kristinn
I sat and read this and thought the same thing.
42 posted on 03/09/2002 12:45:32 AM PST by VaMarVet
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To: KantianBurke
A long read I know but its definetly well done and if one can skip the instinct to skim I tihnk u'll agree :> I hate to admit it but a return to the anti americanism is concievable particuarly if Bush and Rumsfeld aren't completely honest or sucessful. Thoughts? Opinions?

Great post, KB, well worth the read. And I am happy to give you my thoughts/opinions: I wholeheartedly agree with the gist of Podheretz's remarks. The only drawback is that he displays the typical neo-conservative need to 'prove' his pro-Americanism, the result of lingering guilt over his Commie past. But as you yourself said, 'a return to the anti americanism is concievable particuarly if Bush and Rumsfeld aren't completely honest or sucessful.' And, imo, this is to be expected, perhaps deserved, if our leaders botch things up badly. Not that I personally expect them to. But the reality is that war is indeed the most serious of business, requiring not only moral justification but competence and honesty from our leaders. The critics of Vietnam prevailed, imo, because our leaders were NOT open and honest with the public. Who would have thought, in 1964, under cover of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that a few years hence we would have half a million troops in Vietnam? The Tet offensive was a spectacular failure for the enemy, but caused mass disillusionment in the US simply because our leadership had assured us that such a thing could not happen. I admit, as a former leftist, that I fell for the message that we were in 'over our heads'. Yet, what was one to think of the effort in Vietnam when our own President refused to face the voters and announced that he would begin troop withdrawals and 'peace' negotiations? Even Nixon touted his plan, not to WIN that war, but to END the war.

I am aware, therefore, of the possibility of the public's turning against this new war, in fact I couldn't erase that notion from my mind as I listened to Bush's speech declaring war on terrorism and asking for Congressional sanction and broad powers. But I think a few key factors make this much less likely to happen compared to Vietnam:

1) We have been attacked and are in palpable danger of repeated, serious damage to our citizens, to our way of life. Though we fight also for the freedom of others, this is basically a defensive effort, not a rescue operation.

2) It was debated by Congress, albeit hurriedly, and Congress and the public knows what we are getting into. I have believed for some time now that if LBJ had done the same in regards to Vietnam, going before the public to lay out the reasons, goals and dangers beforehand, he might never have lost his nerve in prosecuting that war.

3) There is no draft, no student deferments, to divide and bewilder the fighting-age population. Even if we reach a point of mass mobilization of troops (unlikely, imo), as long as everyone is treated equally and the spirit of volunteerism prevails, the critics will lack a visceral issue around which to mobilize opposition. Their only arguments will be theoretical, and they will sound like the tired ideological blowhards they are. Why this country ever instituted a draft is beyond my understanding. A draft is a form of involuntary servitude to government, unnecessary when the cause is just, insidious and oppressive if the cause should happen to be less than noble and just. (I believe our first draft was during the War Between the States.) <p

43 posted on 03/09/2002 2:23:14 AM PST by pariah
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To: aomagrat
Well, there was a thread on FR a day or so ago about Hollywood remaking "Billy Jack."

Great! 'Billy Jack' is one of my favorite movies to watch... when I need a good laugh! I'll bet the remake would have me falling out of my chair. They could re-cast it in rural NW,with sensitive environmentalists being chased around by chainsaw-wielding loggers...

44 posted on 03/09/2002 2:30:05 AM PST by pariah
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To: Tokhtamish, martian_22
You both make some excellent observations about the 60's. I can tell by your comments you lived those times. I will probably spend a good portion of the rest of my life reflecting on the good and bad aspects of those years, yet I refuse to be guilt-ridden about it all, just grateful to have survived with some semblance of sanity and a healthy respect for this country and its institutions. One thing I am grateful for from the 60's experience though is that I refuse to tailor my opinions to meet any political criteria. I call things as I see them. Self-righteous condemnation and thoughtless criticism mean nothing to me.

Interesting, the contrast between 'The Greening of America' and 'Winning by Intimidation'. An even more striking contradiction is that in, '67 I think, the best-selling album was 'In A Gadda La Vida' by Iron Butterfly, while the best-selling single was 'Ballad of The Green Berets' by Sgt. Barry Sadler. You might hear the Ballad on an FM station, followed by Dylan's 'Masters of War'. What a time!

45 posted on 03/09/2002 2:44:10 AM PST by pariah
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To: pariah
It (our current action) was debated by Congress, albeit hurriedly, and Congress and the public knows what we are getting into. I have believed for some time now that if LBJ had done the same in regards to Vietnam, going before the public to lay out the reasons, goals and dangers beforehand, he might never have lost his nerve in prosecuting that war.

Your point is valid but the failure of the war in Vietnam had nothing to do with LBJ not spelling out what we were doing. He and his closest advisors WERE the problem primarily because they injected themselves into management of the war militarily.

That conflict would have been ended rapidly if our military leadership would have been allowed to prosecute the war without constant interference by LBJ and his "team."

Contrast that with what George W. is doing. The military leadership IS managing our efforts in the Afghan conflict.

46 posted on 03/09/2002 4:06:52 AM PST by toddst
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To: pariah
Pariah, you are absolutely right about the American people being emotionally totally unprepared for the Vietnam War. Part of it was a deliberate policy decision to avoid 'war hysteria' in a world of nuclear weapons. Most of it was the incredible complacency of the American public and American elites. It was like pre-1914 Europe. The men around Kennedy and LBJ were technocrats who never for a moment doubted that the government of the United States could do anything it wanted to do. They assured America that the war would be short and the cost light. The American public was serenely confident in the wisdom of its leaders and its status as God's template of how the world should be. It never entered anyone's mind that the war would last as long as it did and cost as much as it did.

The reason why Podhoretz is dead wrong is that he repeats the mistake the antiwar types made during the Gulf War. The 60's antiwar movement had three components...

1. Sincere pacifists. Mennonites, Quakers, Joan Baez, etc.

2. Hard ultraleftists who were really hawks for the other side.

These two groups were against the war in 1965 and they were and are insignificant. Antiwar opposition only became significant when group 3 emerged.

3. People who had originally supported the war but now questioned the cost and goals (i.e., why should we fight harder for South Vietnam than the South Vietnamese themselves are ?). Group 3 never opposed cold war anticommunism as the basis of foreign policy and returned to the political mainstream after the war. They never had any respect for flag burners. You have to understand that in the end, the only justification Nixon could come up with for Vietnam (especially after the rapprochement with China destroyed the geopolitical assumptions the war was based on) was "credibility". Pride. I am asking you to die so I don't have to say that I lost a war.

The Gulf War antiwar types were groups 1 and 2. They thought they could just pick up from 1971 with half a million people picketing the Pentagon. They didn't understand, as Podhoretz doesn't, that defeatism only comes from a country losing confidence in irresolute, inept leaders. They didn't understand that the American people understand completely where group 2 is coming from and thoroughly despise them. Then as now, no American political figure of consequence is touching the antiwar types with a ten foot pole. The Democratic Party is desparate to avoid the blunders of the Age of McGovern and maybe elect another Democratic President again. They remember that aside from the fluke of Jimmy Carter the American people never again trusted the Democrats to provide a Cold War commander in chief. Throughout American history every political party that has ever opposed a war has been punished very severely.

Even on the Left you see this. There are many on the left who see identity politics and the cultural left as no substitute for the blue collar voters they lost in the culture wars. They understand that anti globalism is their best hope of bringing back them back and reconstituting at least in part the New Deal coalition. They also understand that blue collar voters are very patriotic and will have nothing to do with antiwar types. They want to avoid "Hippies vs Hardhats II". So that is why you are not seeing much of a push from the Left against the war. The smart ones know better than to squander scarce political capital on a sure loser cause.

47 posted on 03/09/2002 4:30:19 AM PST by Tokhtamish
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To: KantianBurke
When I finished reading this article, I realized the time, concentration and discipline required to absorb it. I was wondering how many readers would click it off a third of the way through and move on to read lighter and less challenging fluff flooding too many of FR's threads these days.

To my surprise and delight, this article is inspiring a steady stream of thoughtful comments and debate. I'm heartened by the fact there IS quite a vast community of freepers interested in things intellectual. A post such as this one brings them out and we are all the better for it.

For too long, the realm of intellectualism has been scoffed at by the right and conceded to the left. People buy the perception that the leftist academia world, the media and the literary/arts community have an insurmountable lock on deep political and ideological thinking, and nobody can do much about it. Also, too often, the right shrugs its collective shoulders, passing off leftist assaults on American minds as just "more nutty professors sounding off".

What is often overlooked and yet sorely needed is counter-attacks by rightist intellectuals so that the entrenched position firmly held today by the socialist, communist, pacifist, hate-America, one-world education/information cabal is infiltrated, shaken to the core and broken up.

Norman's article is one such counter-attack. Other rightist intellectuals such as Horowitz endeavor to do the same. While we may not agree with everything they say or do, the right's few battling intellectuals should be supported and valued.

It's vital to know the past and learn from it. Most of the great Euro and Asian wars and revolutions the past two centuries were hatched not by peasants or shopkeepers, but by small cadres of faceless intellectuals, writers, professors, philosophers, scientists, along with disaffected students from the campuses of great universities, and alienated sons and daughters of wealthy and noble families. They had one trait in common....they were not warriors in the physical sense, but were educated and used their minds as weapons.

Thus, it's vital we re-take and conquer the bastions of intellectualism in this country. Podhoretz is doing his part. I really don't care if he's a conservative or a "neo-conservative" at this point. He's a precious and scarce commodity in the war to influence young thinkers, many of whom will be America's future leaders.

Leni

48 posted on 03/09/2002 4:44:22 AM PST by MinuteGal
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To: jwh_Denver
Podhoretz is simply making the point that the Vietnamese War was a popular intervention which was nonetheless undone by a tiny but determined and critically situated minority

That's BS.

I think you need to read the entire essay. And please take your "BS" bit and stick it in your ear.

49 posted on 03/09/2002 4:49:22 AM PST by WarrenC
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To: KantianBurke
Excellent synopsis of the evolution of the socialist left; the past, current and potential problems they will create; and what we can do to help absolve America of this problem.

The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

We need to arm ourselves with information, stand proudly and verbally in defense of America, teach our children to do these things, and not let those who would destroy America from within win. They have the advantage in that they have been unapposed for so long. Loud, thopughtful, and public condemnation of the left and their ideas whenever they are confronted is required. It is hard to do, especially since they tend to travel in groups, but it is very fulfilling.

50 posted on 03/09/2002 5:05:47 AM PST by ridensm
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To: KantianBurke
    What happened during the sixties was a gross abuse of 
idealism; the mistaking of idealism for wisdom by a bunch
of young people who were still being mentally potty trained. The activists back then recognized some of the ills of
American society and they decided to do something about it
-- outside the system. They tried to fix what they thought
was a bad situation -- and they made it worse. They never realized that they were pawns.

51 posted on 03/09/2002 5:06:16 AM PST by Consort
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To: All
A thanks everyone bump. FYI I came across this speech on the Frontpagemagazine.com website.
52 posted on 03/09/2002 5:36:41 AM PST by KantianBurke
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To: KantianBurke; MinuteGal ;Tokhtamish ;McGavin999;Justa
Norman Podhoretz names names, and then proceeds to use their words to hoist the original 'West Side Jacobins' , the then members of academe and the media , and the present day acolytes of these influential voices on their own petard.

The man is truly brilliant and is more understandable than Wm Buckley in his choice of vocabulary in explaining 'how things work'.

53 posted on 03/09/2002 5:40:21 AM PST by prognostigaator
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To: prognostigaator,JohnHuang2
think u might like this bump
54 posted on 03/09/2002 5:43:01 AM PST by KantianBurke
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To: prognostigaator
"...the then members of academe and the media , and the present day acolytes of these influential voices on their own petard."

Big deal. These pseudo-communists are only "influential" through one's affinity and belief in them. If they discussed Kampuchia and mass murder in intellectual terms would you still call them influential? Clue: The premise of morality is based upon the individual, not the collective. The 'greater good' BS is the normal starting point for tyrants.

"September 11 reminded me, too, of a poem by W. H. Auden...written upon the outbreak of World War Two, was entitled “September 1, 1939.” It contained hostile sentiments about America left over from Auden’s Communist period, but the opening lines are so evocative of September 11, 2001 that it is no wonder they were quoted so often in the early days of this new war:

A communist's musings on the causes of WWII? Is this really what we want our political dialog regarding Islamic terrorism founded upon? Well, Mr. Podhoretz founded his argument upon it. What an ASS. I say "in his face". It's the old 'split-the-difference' logic. By taking on extreme politic viewpoints (communism in America) and rationalizing their politics via argument the solution is merely a reduction of that platform, not an abbrogation. It is in essence, damage control.

I sympathizize with the conservative FReepers stuck in Liberal-dominated regions and lives. I just don't want to see them unwittingly sucked into a defense of liberalism a.k.a. communism as Mr. Podhoretz does with his speech. He does not abrogate liberalism, he rationalizes it to the point of repair. If it 'works-for-you' then I'm sorry, you've been duped. Hopefully, you fell for it due to campy, patriotic snippets he sprinkled throughout it.

55 posted on 03/09/2002 8:04:31 AM PST by Justa
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To: prognostigaator
To substantiate the leftist intent of the article:

"The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will…experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

To which, surely, the only fitting response is a very loud and a very resonant Amen.

The first paragraph establishes the social collective as the venue for discussing 9/11. The second is a tacky pull at those who believe in God (the non-communists), in other words, the target audience.

56 posted on 03/09/2002 8:21:14 AM PST by Justa
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To: ridensm
The DC Chapter is planning a counterprotest to the anti-war groups who will be gathering illegally at the White House on April 20. Care to join us? It would be great to see you again.
57 posted on 03/09/2002 10:13:23 AM PST by Angelwood
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To: VietVet
***No compromise. No concilliation with evil.***

One must come out shooting and take no prisoners. When we agreed to debate over America, we lost it.

When you speak the truth about a matter even today the politico-racial names start flying. They tell me that saying and doing the right thing never was popular....

58 posted on 03/09/2002 10:50:17 AM PST by martian_22
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To: Dave Dilegge; kristinn
Sep 29? Sorry, Bud, you're gonna have to clue me in.
59 posted on 03/09/2002 11:54:13 AM PST by BufordP
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To: WarrenC
I think you need to read the entire essay.

I did and I still stick to what I posted. I realize this country has been directed to go in certain directions only to the extent the majority goes along with it. This small vocal minority did not attract the mainstream American but did collect the various oddballs any society has. Like I said, the majority of Americans only turned their opinion around when they realized what was going on.

60 posted on 03/09/2002 12:04:15 PM PST by jwh_Denver
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