The debate over going to war with Iraq has been intriguing. We find individuals and groups who have agreed upon very little politically up until now joining sides. I can’t, for example, think of any other issue of any significance where Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan took the same position as Ted Kennedy.
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Or where the editors of National Review and The Weekly Standard stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Sen. Charles Schumer of New York.
Of course, the rightwing commentators who argue against the war do so for reasons different from the leftists. They insist that they can find no American national interest worth the sacrifice in blood and treasure we will have to expend to defeat Saddam Hussein. The conservative “doves” do not paint the United States as a tool of powerful corporate interests seeking to dominate the world’s oil reserves. It would be hard to make the case that they are guilty of any hypocrisy or of maneuvering cynically for political advantage.
And am I saying that the left is doing that? It looks that way to me. Their maneuvering is too obvious. In what way? Let’s examine the left’s criticisms of the Bush administration’s dealings with Saddam. They tell us that we can’t go to war without the solid backing of the United Nations. Whether or not you agree with that notion, why weren’t people like Ted Kennedy and Joseph Biden making the same argument when Bill Clinton sent the troops to Kosovo? He did that without United Nations’ backing, you will recall.
And what about the oft-repeated line that we are focusing on the wrong enemy, because Saddam is not as much a threat to world peace as North Korea? Do you think the liberals would be calling for a get-tough approach with North Korea if Saddam were to suddenly disappear from the world stage? I’m sorry: I don’t. They backed the Clinton administration’s conciliatory approach to the North Koreans. They never called for a get-tough approach with any other Marxist power, from the Soviet Union, to North Vietnam, to Cuba to Nicaragua. It is hard not to conclude that the reason they want to focus on North Korea at this moment is to weaken the Bush administration’s hand in dealing with Iraq.
I would argue the same can be said about the line we hear frequently from prominent leftists, most recently from Bill and Hillary Clinton: that we should be focusing on Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network instead of Iraq. Okay. But when was the last time that the American left called for a concerted military effort against world terrorist groups? They are critical of our current military’s efforts against South American narco-terrorist groups. They wanted us to take a conciliatory approach toward Fidel Castro, even when he was exporting revolution throughout Latin America. I can remember Hillary Clinton arguing that we would not see the end of Middle East terrorist groups until the Palestinians had a homeland. But now they tell us that al Qaeda must be defeated before we can focus on Saddam Hussein.
And would Nelson Mandela be saying the same things about the United States’ relationship with the United Nations if Bill Clinton were still president? He recently proclaimed at a women’s conference in Johannesburg that the U.S. is “undermining the authority of the United Nations because Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, is black,” and that the U.S. “never did that when the secretary-generals were white.” Clinton’s decision to move troops into Bosnia without United Nations backing did not impress Mandela as a similar affront to Kofi Annan, who was just as black back then.
Leftwing literary guru Susan Sontag, an outspoken opponent of war with Iraq, has been equally inconsistent. She became a hawk for the first time in her adult life when Clinton was president, arguing in favor of his military intervention in Bosnia. In answer to the placards of the anti-war protestors of the time, she wrote, “For Peace? Who is not? But how can you stop those bent on genocide without making war?” She mocked the notion of a “helpless Europe being dragged into a bellicose folly by Big Bad America.”
Then she concluded, “Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust…. Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn’t solve anything.)… There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars. And this is a just war.”
We are left wondering how Sontag makes these distinctions between the Serbs and Saddam Hussein. Is it that she saw the Serbs as a greater threat to United States? That she believes the Serbs were crueler to the Muslim minorities in Bosnia than Saddam has been to the Kurds in Iraq? That Saddam is more open to negotiations and reasonable compromise than Slobodan Milosevic? I’d love to hear her make that case. It would give Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly a month’s worth of sound bites.
And where was Richard Gere when Clinton was in his standoff with Milosevic? Gere attributes Bush’s opposition to Saddam to some deep psychological disorder: “I keep asking myself where all this personal enmity between George Bush and Saddam Hussein comes from. It’s like the story of Captain Ahab and the great white whale from Moby Dick.” Dustin Hoffman observed that Bush “has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country, and I think that’s reprehensible.” I don’t remember Hoffman making this point about the tales of the rapes and mass graves in Bosnia that were used to generate support for Clinton’s intervention.
Look: There are reasons to oppose war with Iraq. The Pope and the American bishops have offered several. But that does not mean that we should ignore the American left’s flip-flops on this question. Either their ideological enthusiasm has blinded them to their inconsistency, or we are witnessing crass maneuvering for political advantage.
