Hedging on Iraq

Victor David Hanson's "Hedging on Iraq" wondering how Americans will eventually decide on the merits of the war, had this:

A dying generation of aging dissidents is desperately trying to find some final redemption to their life-long suspicion of the United States military. For these Vietnam-era retirees, the televised mayhem from Iraq, not the other 25.9 million Iraqis living in relative calm, will always be the second coming of rice paddies and Rolling Thunder.

Many of those who detest the war, I suspect, are committed to an Internationalist movement that cannot succeed if challenged on a single issue. This makes them less than an ideological movement than a power-for-power's sake cabal. There is no defining, pervasive ideology to bind the Internationalists, no band of brotherhood carved in philosophy or a long-term ideological plan. The Internationalists are not even united on economic models. They use their opposition to the U.S. to motivate their members, a scheme based on envy and fueled by resentment and European anti-semitism. They long ago abandoned Christianity, and Secularism is not so much a choice as a opposing position. They do not want freedom from religion; they want the end of religion.

Having committed themselves to be the Opposition, having defined themselves as resisters, they have no choice but oppose every action they have not themselves introduced. This is why so many of their actions are perceived as irrational. They vote for the war, but not the funds. They stand with the U.S. only when they think their country will fail so that they can be the Opposition. The rewards are great for their resistance. The New York Times loves em, the rest of the media falling in behind in slavish support. Old Europe, the French Club of the corrupt, beams happily. The world leaders Kerry says support him over George Bush are the same people who stood passively at the sidelines in Rwanda, in Iraq, in the Congo, Uganda, Kenya and the Sudan. It's a role they have practiced as uncommitted spectators of Pol Pot's madness, Robert Mugabe's insanity in Zimbabwe, for necklacing in South Africa. These are the world leaders who propped up Saddam Hussein, found no alarm in Al-Quida, express outrage in East Timor but are curiously silent about Chinese Marxists in Tibet or the Chinese threat to Taiwan.

As for voters, that large number of uncommitted are simply unconcerned with anything but their own well being. This has always been so in politics. It's what the MTv "Get out the vote" campaign is designed to do - encourage the uniformed to go to the polls. Mass man, mass vote. This election will determine whether the majority of Americans want to define themselves that way.

Communism failed, not only because it was irrational, but because it was empty of meaning and substance. Communism was confrontation. Just like Internationalism is today.