Whatever one thinks about the war with Iraq, one thing has become clear. The American left was staggeringly wrong in their predictions about what would happen when our forces moved into the country.
Please note that I am referring to the political left’s position on the war, which is very different from that taken by Church leaders or rightwing commentators such as Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran. Those of the political left warned that our military would cause thousands of civilian casualties; that the Iraqi Republican Guard would take a heavy toll on our troops heading toward Baghdad; that we would get “bogged down” in a “Vietnam-like quagmire” and that the Iraqi people would rise up against us in an urban guerrilla war that would make the Russian experience in Chechnya look like a walk in the park.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Which is why the leftwing talking heads have shifted ground, acting as if they knew all along that our troops would win an easy victory. It is why they are now focusing on the problems they say we will face in rebuilding Iraq after our victory on the battlefield.
But let us not let them off the hook. We should not overlook that this is not the first time the American left has been wrong in their analysis of world events. Far from it. They have been wrong repeatedly over the last quarter of a century. Think back. They told us we had no choice but to seek a reconciliation with the vital and confident “workers paradise” in the Soviet Union, that Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas were widely supported by the masses in their respective countries. They laughed when Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet “evil empire.” They ridiculed as simple-minded those who spoke of the Soviet satellites as “captive nations.”
One would think that it would be impossible for “experts” to be this wrong, so often, and still keep positions of influence in our universities and the media. If the engineers in the engineering department repeatedly came up with designs for bridges that collapsed, they would be forced to come up with an explanation for their poor judgment. Why then is it that the new left ideologues can go on making their analyses of world events without even making reference to how wrong they have been on great questions of our time? I guess the answer is easy. As long as the left controls the university departments and centers of media power, they will ignore and shrug off each other’s mistakes.
But that should not hold us back from asking the question: Why does the left see the world as they do? Why do they “blame America first,” in the words of Jeane Kirkpatrick? Why do they romanticize thugs like Mao and Fidel Castro? Why do they expect our military to fail unless it has the support of the “world community”? Why were they so wrong about the great populist support that they thought would gather around Saddam Hussein? There is no simple or easy answer to that question. It is like a mosaic, with many fragments forming the whole.
Where to start? I guess it should be with the fact that since the Cold War our enemies have been socialist governments (Saddam was not a Marxist but his Ba’ath Party is socialist). The American left has a reflexive sympathy for socialism, rooted in their shared sympathy with the notion that government-directed redistribution of wealth is the most effective instrument for economic justice. They tend to believe that the masses in socialist governments support their governments in gratitude for the job security and “free” medical care they receive, even when the government is as brutal a dictatorship as Saddam Hussein’s. They cannot picture them viewing the American military, the armed forces of a capitalist country, as liberators.
The American left’s affinity for world government plays a part as well. This is the reason why they recoil from “unilateral” American military action. The left is looking for an end to the nation-state system, to be brought about through a gradual transfer of power to the United Nations. When the United States acts in defense of its national interests without the approval of the “world community,” it perpetuates the older nation-state model for world politics. This situation is exacerbated for the left when the United States acts successfully. The move toward world government is set back.
But wasn’t the left’s opposition to war with Iraq motivated by a concern for the loss of life that would entail, by a horror over violence and bloodshed? True, that is what they said was their motivation. Yet, if that is the case, why weren’t the leftwing protestors up in arms when Bill Clinton sent the troops into Bosnia? Why did the left make excuses for the violence carried out by the Viet Cong, by the black revolutionaries in South Africa and the former Rhodesia? Why do the leftists in Hollywood and the academy continue to laud the guerilla actions carried out by French partisans against the Nazis?
Why did university leftists host cocktail parties for Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas? Why do they continue to glamorize the Americans who went to Spain in the 1930s to fight with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade against the Spanish Nationalists? It is clear. For the left, there is violence and there is violence. When force is used for leftwing causes or under the jurisdiction of the United Nations, they tell us that “you can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs.” But when the United States acts “unilaterally” in defense of national interests, we are “acting like cowboys.”
There is another chunk of the mosaic, one harder to isolate for analysis. I submit that the left’s opposition to American military action is rooted in the larger culture war. When our military succeeds in a dramatic fashion, leftists become uncomfortable. For decades now, since the protest movements of the 1960s, the left has both ridiculed and harshly caricatured the kinds of Americans who rise to positions of influence in the military. Our military and its leaders tend to come from what the liberals in the media and the academy call “fly-over country.” They do not often share the values and lifestyles favored by the secular left. It was not a slip of the tongue when the young Bill Clinton spoke of “loathing the military,” or when the 1960s protestors called soldiers and policemen “pigs.”
The sight of American soldiers and marines being cheered by Iraqi masses cannot sit well with the aging hippies in the media and the academy, who very well may have once adorned their dorm room with that famous picture of Che Guevara. Bright and articulate military officers sailing with ease through press conferences with reporters trying to put them in a corner belies the image of the military officer pushed by Hollywood.
One last thing: Polls indicating overwhelming support for the Bush administration’s handling of the war may be the sharpest blow; they put in jeopardy the left’s hope that they can undo the “illegitimate” Bush victory in the last election.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at jkfitz42@aol.com.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
