Desperation of the X42 apologists: Hugh Hewitt on Joshua Marshall's bitter attempts at redemption

It took more than 30 years for the achievements of the World War II generation to come completely into focus, and the appreciation of their valor grew steadily for the next 20 years. Herman Wouk and Stephen Ambrose were among those who captured the drama and the sacrifice, the bravery and the stubborn determination of the men who fought and won the battle against fascism. Those who came of age shortly after those epic battles have lived in their shadows, and the enormity of the threat and the evil of the '40s eclipsed even the enormous courage of the men who fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

The passage of time and events has also reduced the reputations of the leaders who shrank from confronting the evil in those times, and there is no way to redeem the indecision and craven timidity they displayed then.

We have entered another era of epic events, and we are on the cusp of a year that almost certainly will be as consequential for the world's future as any of the early years in the struggle with fascism. Iraq will be invaded, North Korea confronted and al-Qaida pursued throughout 2003. If the resolution of free peoples to follow these three courses flags in any significant way, the results will be as serious as the consequences that flowed when the French and the British did nothing when Hitler first began to re-arm, then sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936 and then absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938. The various peace caucuses sputter at such obvious comparisons because of the undeniable instruction they provide.

The awful toll of World War II was not inevitable. It could have been prevented. But the people who would have prevented it were not in power. They were backbenchers, and they were widely derided by the powerful forces of appeasement, which in those days was not a pejorative term. Those who warned against Hitler and who counseled re-armament and blunt opposition to Germany's many provocations were mocked and scolded. Only the horrible results of their being ignored would prove them right – the sort of comfort no decent man ever covets.

Which brings me to Joshua Micah Marshall, rising star of the left, and a recent convert (June 2002, by his own admission) to the necessity of toppling Saddam, though still trying hard to make the Clinton gang other than the total dupes they turned out to be on North Korea. Marshall is a bright fellow and very witty. As is usually the case with the left, witty is mistaken for wise, clever arguments are mistaken for persuasive arguments and wishful thinking is mistaken for hard facts.

It is tough, after all, to be a defender of positions and people exposed as terribly incompetent and foolish.

I don't mind Marshall trying his best to cover for the foreign-policy sins of eight years of Clinton fecklessness. To assess the effort as "threadbare" would be generous. It is a lot like the dilemma faced by the friends of Chamberlain, Baldwin and MacDonald: There are some political decisions that cannot be defended, and silence is the best tactic.

Marshall and others, however, have decided that the best defense is a good offense, and are trying to pin the perfidy of North Korea – abetted by the see-no-evil resoluteness of the Clinton team – on the Bush administration. In doing so, Marshall uses an absolutely childish tactic of attributing psychological defects to the people who were correct about North Korea and most other matters all along. Marshall wrote just this week that:

I do know some of these guys, and I do know what Marshall is getting at: He's getting at the fact that for eight long years of Clinton amateurism, these guys were right on every major foreign-policy issue. To be specific on just one issue: When the sands of the hourglass were running out on Clinton, just prior to the orgy of parties and pardons, the great legacy hunt was leading to a Clinton visit to North Korea and "normalization" of relations with the despot who was cheating us then, even as he starved his own people.

It was Gaffney, Perle and a few others who raised the alarms and prevented another massive, self-inflicted wound. In short, what Marshall is "getting at" is that there are experts who have been right for so long that they deserve to be listened to, and will be listened to unless the media is schooled in ignoring them. Thus the mockery. Marshall and the others who cheered the Clinton team then and now have no credibility on North Korea. They are bitter. And the bitterness shows in such taunts as the Web makes easy to dispense.

It can't work, of course, because the events are too serious and the record too clear. You can't blame 9-11 and the growth of al-Qaida, or North Korea's permission slip to cheat, or Iran going nuclear on the Bush administration any more than the invasion of Poland can be laid at Churchill's feet. To even try is to reveal either an intellectual desperation or a fundamental incoherence so extreme as to disqualify the writer even from areas where he or she might actually have some insight.

2003 will be a momentous year, and those who want to comment on its events would do well to prepare to do so by reading the second volume in William Manchester's biography of Churchill, "Alone." Clinton's presidency, like the governments of Baldwin and Chamberlain, cannot be redeemed by attacks on the Bush administration, and the foreign policy "elites" of the left cannot have their tattered credibility restored via attacks on the experts who were first right about the Soviets and who have now been shown to be right about our current set of enemies.

In fact, given the record of Gaffney and his colleagues, Marshall might want to link to the Center For Security Policy and start reading. Talent is a terrible thing to waste.

By the way, my prediction is that this will be an odd year!!!
For a few MORE predictions, see:

The Year Ahead: Predictions for 2003 [from National Review]
www.NationalReview.com ^ | December 27, 2002 | An NRO Symposium [Frum, Golberg, Hanson, Hewitt, Steyn, et al]
Posted on 01/01/2003 1:17 PM PST by RonDog

December 27, 2002 12:00 p.m.
The Year Ahead
Predictions for 2003.

An NRO Symposium

RO asked some familiar daring faces to make predictions about the new year. Read their brave predictions, and don't forget to check back later in the year to see who was most right…and wrong!
-- snip --
Victor Davis Hanson
Revelations in a post-Hussein Iraq of Saddam's frightening weapons, torture, and mass murder will shock even realists.
After some frightening events, we will liberate Iraq as unlikely would-be allies join in on the war against terror.
Parts of bin Laden's corpse will turn up.
The anthrax attacks will be positively linked to Iraq and al Qaeda.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of NRO and author of An Autumn of War.

Hugh Hewitt
There will be two retirements from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003: Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'Connor. The president will nominate Justice Scalia to replace the retiring chief, and will nominate California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown and recently confirmed judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Miguel Estrada to the two vacancies. Both will be confirmed by comfortable margins.
Orange County California Sheriff Mike Carona will declare his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat held by Barbara Boxer.
Fox News Channel will continue to rise in the ratings, and the first half-hour of Special Report will be carried in prime time on the Fox Network as an evening newscast that will quickly pass the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in total audience, forcing Rather into early retirement. MSNBC will discover that Jesse Ventura was a much better governor than he is a talk-show host. Nachman will move into primetime, and Buchanan and Press into the late night.
The Bush administration will unveil a health-insurance initiative aimed at low and middle-income Americans not presently eligible for group insurance at their place of employment. The model will be the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program ("FEHB"), and insurance companies that wish to be eligible to participate in the FEHB will be obliged to offer coverage to the uninsured targeted by the initiative.
— Hugh Hewitt is a radio talk show host. The Hugh Hewitt Show can be heard daily at www.hughhewitt.com.
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2003 will be a momentous year, and those who want to comment on its events would do well to prepare to do so by reading the second volume in William Manchester's biography of Churchill, "Alone."
From amazon.com:

Freedom's Greatest Defender, Hitler's Greatest Enemy!, May 2, 2002

Reviewer: dougrhon (see more about me) from Rego Park, New York USA

Most people today know Winston Churchill at the great British Prime Minister of WWII. But Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister and had a public career spanning more than forty years. In this excellent book [Alone, Volume TWO] which is part biography, part history, William Manchester focuses on the period of 1932-1940 when Churchill was out of power, an outcast in his own party and universally derided as a warmongering relic. Churchill referred to these years as his "wilderness years" and they are among the most fascinating of his life because the years of Churchill's political exile coincide with the rise of Hitler and the growth of Germany from defeated power to world menace.
Indeed, as Manchester chronicles, Churchill's return from the wilderness was intimately connected to the rise of Hitler because Churchill's relentless public opposition to Hitlerism and British policy towards Germany throughout the thirties is what led to his continuing exile while this same stalwartness preserved him from the mark of shame that infected the rest of the British elite when the policy of appeasement collapsed in 1939...