On NRO today, Victor Davis Hanson has another eloquent column on the less-heralded developments in the war and the potential consequences of a Kerry victory, Do We Want to Go Back?. Excerpts:
Despite hysteria that the Bush administration is in the clutches of some vast neoconservative (read Jewish/Likud) conspiracy, it has advanced the most ambitious, humane, and needed initiatives for the Middle East in the last half century. Precisely because we no longer give autocracies a pass for pumping oil and keeping out Communists and are no longer complacent as usual, but unpredictably angry about terrorism our policy now is neither cynical realism nor starry-eyed multilateral fantasy.Instead, without naivetι we strive for constitutional government and modernization. We are trying to help to integrate the Middle East into the rest of the world's democratic economy and to end our own appeasement of fundamentalism, dictatorship, gender-apartheid, anti-Semitism, press censorship, and pathetic victimhood that all played their parts in leading to September 11.
and
More likely, if President Bush loses, the war against terror will return, as promised, to the status of a police matter subpoenas and court trials the more appropriate response to the mass murder of 3,000 at the "crime scene" of the crater in New York. Europe will be assured that our troops will stay while we apologize for the usual litany of purported unilateral sins. North Korea will get more blackmail cash, while pampered South Korean leftists resume their "sunshine" mirage. Iraq will be turned over to the U.N. as we abruptly leave, and could dissolve into something like the Balkans between 1991 and 1998. Iran and Syria will let out a big sigh of relief as American diplomats once more sit out on the tarmac in vain hopes of an "audience" with despots. The Saudis will smile that smile. Arafat will be assured that he is now once again a legitimate interlocutor. And strangest of all, the American Left will feel that the United States has just barely begun to return to its "moral" bearings even as its laxity and relativism encourage some pretty immoral things to come.If White House politicos figured that many who were angered about out-of-control federal spending and immigration proposals would grumble, but not abandon Mr. Bush given the global stakes involved after September 11, and the specter of a new alternative foreign policy far to the left of that of a Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright then they were absolutely right.
I hope he's correct about those threatening to abandon President Bush. In any event, please read the whole thing.
Posted by oscarjr at March 5, 2004 11:25 AM | TrackBack