side of history won’t be pretty
Excerpt:
Thus it would be wise for Europeans to get out ahead of the curve, and be resolute in supporting the removal of Saddam Hussein, before they, like the Arab "moderates," become increasingly irrelevant. The real story is not one of anti-Americanism — itself old and boring — but of a new anti-Europeanism prevalent here. Personally I would not worry too much about the anger of a spent France or schizophrenic Germany, but would about an aroused United States — not merely because of its power, but because exasperated Americans have a longer memory. How strange that increasingly Russians, Indians, and eastern Europeans — not our more natural allies, Frenchmen or Germans — are now more popular with us.
Indeed, for all the grand idealism of Kyoto, Durban, and the ICC, Americans accept that in the past western Europeans would have cold-heartedly sold out Taiwan, Israel, or South Korea in any major confrontation in which democracy and sacrifice on the one side were pitted against autocracy, profit, and appeasement on the other. So Iraq is not merely a referendum on European-American relations, but rather a litmus test of the moral status of Europe itself, and of what side of history it wishes to be on. Let us hope it awakens from its ethical coma to take its rightful place at the vanguard of the war against barbarity.
The American left has missed yet another train as it was leaving. Currently it is reeling from an array of staggering developments that in the post-Cold War era threaten to leave it as discredited as segregationist Republicans were during the civil-rights movement. Anti-Semitism is suddenly more commonly a phenomenon of the academic Left than of the old, white, Neanderthal Right. Multiculturalism and cultural equivalence have been refuted by the ghoulish nature of the Taliban; the more the world learns about the "alternative" universe of Saddam Hussein and kindred Middle Eastern regimes, the more it shudders in horror.
Censorship, catcalls at lectures, and the stealing of newspapers are not Mr. Ashcroft's doing but now also a hallmark of the campus Left — mostly ignored by timid college presidents. Amnesty International and the United Nations mollify rather than oppose odious regimes. Pacifism does not work in a world where the World Trade Center is incinerated. The hysterics of a Chomsky, Vidal, Mailer, or Said — never really refuted by the more responsible Left — were proved harebrained by the rapidity and economy of the American victory and the benevolent nature of the Karzai government in Afghanistan.
Exaggerating the collateral damage from the most precise weapons in military history, inflating by magnitudes of ten and more civilian casualties, spreading ad hoc conspiracy theories about pipelines, oil, and Texas corporations, raising doomsday scenarios of global anti-Americanism and nuclear hysteria in the Middle East — all that is about the extent and quality of the current anti-war exegesis, itself mostly discredited by its previous and completely wrong predictions concerning Afghanistan.
So in the few days that are left, in the calm before the storm, the Left should scramble to reclaim its moral currency by condemning our enemies and disassociating itself from appeasement. If it does not, the 2004 elections may well resemble 1972 or 1980 in their lopsidedness. The shrillness of Kerry more and more resembles a 1972 McGovern or 1980 Carter.
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