by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n F<\/span>or all the talk of imperial America, and our frequent \u201cpolice actions,\u201d we are hardly militarists. Protected by two-oceans, and founded on the principles of non-interference in Europe\u2019s bloody internecine wars, the United States has always been rightly circumspect about going to war abroad. The American people are highly individualistic, skeptical of war\u2019s utility, and traditionally distrustful of government \u2014 and wary of the need of their sacrifice for supposed global agendas.<\/p>\n So we go to war reluctantly. And being human, our support for war hinges on it being short and economical, and waged for professed idealistic principles. Wars that drag on past three years \u2014 from the Civil War to Vietnam \u2014 can often lead to demonstrations and popular disdain.<\/p>\n By the same token, some politics are more compatible with the American perception of the need to fight.<\/p>\n It was not only Lincoln\u2019s gifted rhetoric that got the Union through Cold Harbor and the Wilderness, but after the war\u2019s initial months of hard fighting, his reinvention of the North\u2019s very aims, from a utilitarian struggle to restore the United States to a moral crusade to end slavery and the power of the plantationists for good. In that effort, he was willing to suspend habeas corpus, sidestep the Congress, and govern large chunks of the border-states through martial law.<\/p>\n Woodrow Wilson intervened liberally in Central America. He led us to war against right-wing Prussian militarism. His \u201ctoo proud to fight\u201d slogan in no time was scrapped for the Fourteen Points, a utopian blueprint for the nations of the world, handed down by a former professor from his high and moralistic Olympus.<\/p>\n Few worried that Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only waged a savage global struggle against Italian, German, and Japanese fascism, but in the process did some pretty unsavory and markedly illiberal things at home. It was no right-wing nut who locked up Japanese-Americans without regard for habeas corpus or ordered German agents to be shot as terrorists.<\/p>\n To end the dictatorial and genocidal plans of Slobodan Milosevic, liberal Bill Clinton was willing to bomb downtown Belgrade, commit American forces to a major campaign without U.S. Senate approval and bypass the United Nations altogether. Few accused him of fighting an illegal war, contravening U.N. protocols, or cowardly dropping bombs on civilians. In all these cases, public opposition was pretty much muted, despite the horrendous casualties involved in some of these past conflicts.<\/p>\n S<\/span>ome general principles, then, can guide us in determining American reactions to war, and they transcend even the notion of comparative sacrifice and cost. Progressives, like a Wilson or Clinton, who, we are assured, hate war, can intervene far more easily, and are more likely to receive a pass from a hypercritical elite media.<\/p>\n In the end, they always seem forced to fight by circumstances, since their very liberal natures are supposed to abhor optional conflicts. FDR\u2019s wartime criminal justice apparatus trumped anything that John Ashcroft could imagine, but it has remained relatively unexamined even to this day: liberals must have had very good reasons to put non-white people in camps, so contrary to their innate notions of social justice.<\/p>\n Second, the United States seems to be more united against right-wing fascism than left-wing totalitarianism, perhaps because our elites in academia, journalism, and politics feel authoritarian dictators from the right lack the veneer of egalitarian empathy for the poor. In any case, we are more prone even today to assume the 6-8 million Hitler slaughtered puts him in a category far worse than Stalin or Mao, despite the fact that the two combined did away with ten times Hitler\u2019s tally.<\/p>\n During World War II, here at home we experienced nothing like the Rosenbergs or an Alger Hiss working for the Axis, even though Soviet-inspired global communism would end up liquidating 80 million in Russia and China alone. Fighting North Korea or North Vietnam \u2014 or even waging the Cold War \u2014 was a far more difficult enterprise than opposing the Kaiser, Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo. Our successes were often due to the efforts of strong anti-communist democrats like Harry Truman who could assure our influential universities, media, politicians, writers, actors, and foundations of the real danger, and the fact that the president had little choice but to go to war.<\/p>\n In this context, many had some apprehensions about the present so-called war on terror. Ostensibly, the Islamicists who had pulled off September 11 largely fit past definitions of fascism and so should have galvanized universal traditional American furor.<\/p>\n The tribal followers of bin Laden advocated a return to a mythical age of ideological purity uncorrupted by modernism, democracy, or pluralism. Islamicism certainly held no tolerance for other religions, much less any who were not extreme Muslims. Sexism and racism \u2014 remember bin Laden\u2019s taunts about Africans, ongoing slavery in the Sudan, and the genocide of blacks in Darfur \u2014 were an integral part of radical Islamicist doctrine. Al-Qaeda was not so much chauvinistic as misogynistic. Substitute bin Laden\u2019s evocation of \u201cbeliever\u201d for the old \u201cVolk,\u201d and the crackpot rants about world domination, purity, and the anti-Semitic slurs of \u201capes and pigs\u201d fall into the old fascist slots.<\/p>\n It is no accident that the\u00a0Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Mein Kampf<\/i>\u00a0are still popular sellers among zealots in some capitals of the Arab world. Was our war on terror, then, going to be morally clear to even the most progressive utopian, since our enemies lacked liberal pretensions and the charisma of a Stalin, Ho, Che, or Fidel that so often duped the gullible?<\/p>\n Hardly.<\/p>\n T<\/span>wo factors explain the current growing hysteria over Iraq, and they transcend the complex nature of the war and even the depressing media reports from the battlefield. First is the strange doctrine of multiculturalism that has become one of our most dominant boutique ideologies of the last few decades, as the United States experienced unleveled prosperity, leisure \u2014 and guilt.<\/p>\n All cultures are of equal merit; failure and poverty abroad are never due to indigenous pathology but rather Western colonialism, racism, Christianity, and gender bias. The Other is never to be judged by our own \u201cbiased\u201d standards of jurisprudence and \u201cconstructed\u201d bourgeoisie notions of humanity; those poorer, darker, non-Christian, and non-English-speaking are to be collectively grouped as victims, deserving condescension, moral latitude, and some sort of reparations or down right cash grants. Senator Patti Murray gave us the soccer-mom version of this pathology when she once talked of the need to rival bin Laden\u2019s supposed humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, while Senator Durbin assures us from a private email that poor suspects in Cuba (no longer terrorists who plot to butcher more thousands) suffer the similar fate of Hitler\u2019s victims.<\/p>\n As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.<\/p>\n Extremists that otherwise would be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, murder of Christians, suicide bombing of children, systematic torture \u2014 all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies\u2019 long record of murdering and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin\u2019s infantile rantings would be showcased on\u00a0al-Jazeera.<\/i><\/p>\n When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9-11 of \u201cunity\u201d and \u201cEuropean solidarity\u201d what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic injustice from a suddenly empowered Other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, but had not yet \u201clashed out.\u201d<\/p>\n If one examines the infomercials of a bin Laden or Dr. Zawahiri, or the terrorist communiqu\u00e9s sent to the Westernized media, they are almost all rehashes of the Michael Moore left, from \u201cBush lied\u201d to \u201cHalliburton\u201d to \u201cgenocide\u201d and \u201cGulag.\u201d This now famous \u201cUnholy Alliance\u201d of radical anti-American and reactionary jihadist is really a two-way street: Islamicists mimic the old leftist critique of the United States, and the Western Left hopes that they in turn can at least tone down their rhetoric about knocking walls over gays or sending all women into burqa seclusion\u2014at least long enough to pose as something like disposed Palestinians minus the Hamas bombs laced with feces, rat poison, and nails.<\/p>\n The second problem was not only were we no longer clearly fighting a right-wing extremist ideology, but Texan, twangy, and conservative President Bush was hard to repackage into the reluctant liberal warrior in the image of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, or Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n So there was never much leeway for error in this war. We are not talking in this postmodern era in terms of a past Democratic president invading Latin America, interring citizens in high-plains camps, hanging terrorist suspects, nuking cities, or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Africa, but, at least from the weird present hysteria, something apparently far worse \u2014 like supposedly flushing a Koran at Guantanamo.<\/p>\n In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises that his tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force, makes him seem to enjoy the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order far more destruction. George Bush Sr. barely pulled off freeing Kuwait, but only because he fought on the ground for only 4 days, used the aegis of the U.N., pulled back on televised images of the so-called \u201cHighway of Death,\u201d and was able to avoid going to Baghdad and dealing with a murdering despot still in power.<\/p>\n In contrast, once the metamorphosis of the Islamicists from fascists to victimized critics of the West was well underway, and once a suspect conservative like George Bush eschewed the old League of Nations utopianism, the fireside chat, or the \u2018I feel your pain\u2019 persona of traditional Democratic war leaders, I feared we were in real trouble finishing this war.<\/p>\n C<\/span>ontrary to all recent popular wisdom, the war in Iraq is not a disaster, but nearing success. It has been costly and at times tragic, but a democracy is in place, accords are being hammered out with Sunni rejectionists, and the democratic reformist mindset is pulsating into Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf. This has only been possible because of the courage and efficacy of a much maligned military who, for the lapses of a small minority, has been compared to Stalin and Hitler at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib.<\/p>\n If President Bush were a liberal Democrat, if he were bombing a white Christian, politically clumsy fascist in the heart of Europe, if al Qaeda and its Islamicist adherents were properly seen as 8th-century tormenters of humanists, women, homosexuals, non-Arabs and non-Wahhabi believers, and if Iraq had become completely somnolent with the toppling of Saddam\u2019s statue, then the American people would have remained behind the effort to dismantle Islamic fundamentalism and create the foundations to ensure its permanent demise.<\/p>\n But once the suicide murdering and bombing from Iraq began to dominate the news, then this administration, for historical reasons largely beyond its own control, had a very small reservoir of good will. Quite literally, the Islamicists proved to be more adept in the public relations of winning liberal exemption from criticism than did the administration itself, as one nude Iraqi on film or a crumpled Koran was always deemed far worse than daily beheadings and executions. Indeed, the terrorists were able to morph into downtrodden victims of a bullying, imperialistic America faster than George Bush was able to appear a reluctant progressive warrior at war with the Dark-Age values of fascism.<\/p>\n And once that transformation was established, we were into a dangerous cycle of a conservative, tough-talking president intervening abroad to thwart the poorer of the Third World \u2014 something that has never been an easy thing in recent American history, but now in our own age has become a propagandist\u2019s dream come true.<\/p>\n \u00a92005 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How fascists became the “victims” in the current war. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online For all the talk of imperial America, and our frequent \u201cpolice actions,\u201d we are hardly militarists. Protected by two-oceans, and founded on the principles of non-interference in Europe\u2019s bloody internecine wars, the United States has always been rightly circumspect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[788],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-18h","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10812,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/uncommon-knowledge-part-2-the-second-world-wars-with-victor-davis-hanson\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":0},"title":"Uncommon Knowledge Part 2: The Second World Wars with Victor Davis Hanson","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 12, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This video was originally published by the Hoover Institution. Click here to learn more about this episode. https:\/\/youtu.be\/ux0nzEtUobM Could the Axis powers have won? What are the counterfactuals for World War II?\u00a0 Find out in part two of this episode as\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson joins Peter Robinson to discuss his latest\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/ux0nzEtUobM\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10070,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ancient-laws-modern-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":1},"title":"Ancient Laws, Modern Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 7, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review After eight years of withdrawal, what rules should the U.S. follow to effectively reassert itself in world affairs? The most dangerous moments in foreign affairs often come after a major power seeks to reassert its lost deterrence. The United States may be entering just\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "China"","block_context":{"text":"China","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/china\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13154,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/how-to-start-a-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":2},"title":"How to Start a War","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 15, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Wars often arise from uncertainty. When strong powers appear weak, truly weaker ones take risks they otherwise would not.\u00a0 Sloppy braggadocio and serial promises of restraint alternatively trigger wars, too. Empty tough talk can needlessly egg on aggressors. But mouthing utopian bromides convinces bullies\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Oval-Office.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10536,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/preemptive-strikes-and-preventive-wars-a-historians-perspective\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":3},"title":"Preemptive Strikes and Preventive Wars: A Historian\u2019s Perspective","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 31, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Barry Strauss Strategika Preventive wars and preemptive strikes are both risky business. A preventive war is a military, diplomatic, and strategic endeavor, aimed at an enemy whom one expects to grow so strong that delay would cause defeat. A preemptive strike is a military operation or series of operations\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Strategika"","block_context":{"text":"Strategika","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/strategika\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/buyWarBonds.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4336,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-iraqi-wars\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":4},"title":"The Iraqi Wars","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 12, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Our 15-year conflict with Iraq. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Iraq is a blur now. Everyone from Norman Schwarzkopf and General Zinni to Tommy Franks and General Abezaid is mixed up in our memories. The public can't quite separate Baathists from jihadists, Shiite from Sunni, or one coalition\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2005"","block_context":{"text":"July 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/july-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10830,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-of-wars-analyzed-to-the-third-decimal-place\/","url_meta":{"origin":4357,"position":5},"title":"The War of Wars Analyzed to the Third Decimal Place","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 16, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Santa\u2019s Book Bag By Larry Thornberry \/\/ The American Spectator A magnificent contribution from Victor Davis Hanson. The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won By Victor Davis Hanson (Basic Books, 652 pages, $40) Yes, Virginia, after thousands of books, lectures, debates, veteran memoirs, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "War"","block_context":{"text":"War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4357"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4358,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4357\/revisions\/4358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}