--- Begin Message ---
Bush promised Podhoretz War On Iraq
Podhoretz's Remarks On The Pending "World War IV"
2/20/02 11:37:32 AM
Norman Podhoretz
Speech Given A Few Days Ago -- [Death, death, death to the neo-cons (and
neo-liberals)! Power, power, power
to the workers!]
"The President now promised an expansion of the war to regimes that may or
may
not have been directly involved in 9/11 but whose leaders were preparing
to
threaten us with weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, he declared
that he
would if necessary attack them preemptively. And he reiterated that we
would
prefer to fight with allies, but that if we had to, we would go it alone."
http://www.aei.org/boyer/podhoretz.htm
America at War: �The One Thing Needful�
Norman Podhoretz
Francis Boyer Lecture
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Annual Dinner
February 13, 2002
Washington, D.C.
It is now almost exactly five months since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, and the question I want to explore tonight is
whether
9/11 hurled us into a new era of American history.
Certainly, this is how it seemed. The most obvious symptom was that once
again
we were saluting our now ubiquitously displayed flag. This was the very
flag
that, not so long ago, leftist radicals had thought fit only for burning.
Yet
now, even on the old flag-burning Left, a few prominent personalities were
painfully wrenching their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely
resembling a
salute.
Contemplating these people, I was reminded of the response to the
suppression
by the new Soviet regime of the sailors� revolt that erupted in Kronstadt
in
the early 1920�s. Far more murderous horrors would pour out of the
malignantly
tenebrous recesses of Stalinist rule, but as the first in that long series
of
atrocities leading to disillusionment with the Soviet Union, Kronstadt
became
the portent of them all.
Well, 9/11 served as an inverse Kronstadt for a number of radical Leftists
of
today. What it did was raise questions about what one of them called their
inveterately �negative faith in America the ugly.�
September 11 reminded me, too, of a poem by W. H. Auden, transplanted from
London to New York in a trade of poets (they got T. S. Eliot and we got
Auden
plus a few future draft choices). Auden�s poem, written upon the outbreak
of
World War Two, was entitled �September 1, 1939.� It contained hostile
sentiments about America left over from Auden�s Communist period, but the
opening lines are so evocative of September 11, 2001 that it is no wonder
they
were quoted so often in the early days of this new war:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.
Auden�s low dishonest decade, of course, was the 1930�s, and its clever
hopes
centered on the construction of a workers� paradise in the Soviet Union.
Our
counterpart was the 1960�s, and its less clever hopes centered not on
construction, however illusory, but on destruction�the destruction of the
institutions that made up the American way of life. For America was
conceived
as the great obstacle to any improvement in the lot of the wretched of the
earth, not least those within its own borders.
Now, I recognize that, as James Q. Wilson has recently reminded us, the
Sixties
are not an all-purpose explanation of everything that has gone wrong with
this
country since then. And where the hostility of American intellectuals
toward
America is concerned, I myself have traced it back to the period following
the
Civil War. Nevertheless, I am far from alone in my conviction that the
radical
movement of the Sixties was the proximate source of the �negative faith in
America the ugly� to which so many were converted both during and after
that
period.
Because to me, the new patriotic mood represented a return to greater
sanity
and health, I fervently hoped that it would last. But I want to tell a
story
that will explain why I could not fully share the heady confidence of some
of
my political friends that this was a permanent and not an ephemeral
change.
One day in the year 1960, I was invited to address a meeting of left-wing
radicals. For my sins�sins of which I have been repenting for more than
three
decades by now�I was a leading member of this then tiny movement. The main
issue around which it had first begun to coalesce was nuclear disarmament.
But
the subject on which I had been asked to speak was a new one that had
barely
begun to show the whites of its eyes. It was the possibility of American
military involvement in a faraway place of which we knew little�a place
called
Vietnam.
Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my
staff at
Commentary magazine, of which I had recently become the editor. As we
entered
the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the
fifty or
so people in the audience, and whispered to me: �Do you realize that every
young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?�
Marion Magid�s quip brings back to life some sense of how unpromising a
future
there promised to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would
have
dreamed that the these young people, and the generation about to descend
politically and culturally from them, would within the blink of a
historical
eye be hailed as �the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most
idealistic this country has ever known.� These words, incredibly, would
emanate
from what the new movement regarded as the very belly of the beast: from,
to be
specific, the mouth of Archibald Cox, a professor at the Harvard Law
School and
later Solicitor General of the United States. Similar encomia would also
ooze
unctuously out of parents, teachers, clergymen, artists, and journalists.
More incredible yet, the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned
up
but essentially unchanged, would within a mere ten years turn one of our
two
major parties upside down and inside out. In 1961, President John F.
Kennedy
famously declared that we would �pay any price, bear any burden,� and so
on, �to assure the survival and the success of liberty.� By 1972, George
McGovern, nominated for President by Kennedy�s own party, was campaigning
on
the slogan, �Come Home, America.� It was a slogan that almost perfectly
reflected the ethos of the embryonic movement that I had addressed in
Union
Square only about a decade before.
But the pathetic impression my audience made on Marion Magid does not
begin to
explain why such a development would have struck anyone present that night
as
so unlikely.
For the new movement was bucking a national consensus that came close to
being
universal. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman, recognizing a threat from
Soviet
expansionism, had embraced the policy of containment to deal with it. A
year
later, running for reelection, Truman had fended off challenges both from
his
Right, which regarded containment as�in Richard Nixon�s term��cowardly,�
and
from his Left, to which the same strategy amounted to warmongering.
Truman�s victory, then, signified the coming together of the nation behind
his
foreign policy. But there was also a wider dimension to this emergent
political
consensus, and it was beautifully captured in a historic essay of 1947 by
George F. Kennan. Much later Kennan would deny that he had said what he
said in
that essay, what everyone at the time thought he had said, and what
rereading
the essay clearly demonstrates that he had in fact said. To wit:
The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will�experience a
certain
gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with
this
implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent
on
their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of
moral
and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
In �pulling themselves together� precisely for these reasons and in
precisely
this way, the American people were rewarded with a surge of self-confident
energy. But the effect on the country�s intellectuals was even more
extraordinary. Many of them had only recently gloried in their
�alienation�
from American society. Now they too joined, often to their own
astonishment, in
what the few remaining socialists among them petulantly derided as
the �American celebration.�
Yet this did not result in the loss of creative power smugly predicted by
these
dissenters. On the contrary: the rediscovery by the formerly alienated of
what
Mary McCarthy, one of their brightest young stars, did not shrink from
calling �America the Beautiful,� gave rise to a richer high culture than
the
Thirties before it or the Sixties that followed. I am thinking of the
emergence
in the Fifties of a host of figures who shared in the newly positive
attitude
toward American society: novelists like Saul Bellow; poets like Robert
Lowell;
critics like Lionel Trilling; philosophers like Hannah Arendt; theologians
like
Reinhold Niebuhr; political analysts like George Kennan himself.
In going over this familiar ground, I am trying to make two points. One is
that
the nascent radical movement of the late Fifties and early Sixties was up
against an adversary that looked unassailable. Even so�and here is my
second
point�to the bewilderment of almost everyone, not least the radicals
themselves, they blew and they blew and they blew the house down. And even
some
of the rediscoverers of �America the Beautiful,� including Mary McCarthy,
did
another 180-degree pirouette and contributed a bit of emphysemic blowing
themselves.
Here we had a major turning point that slipped in under the radar of
virtually
all the pundits and the trend-spotters. How well I remember the late John
Roche, a political scientist then working in the Johnson White House,
being
quoted by Jimmy Breslin as having dismissed the radicals as a bunch of
�upper
West Side jackal bins.� Jackal bins? What were jackal bins? As further
investigation disclosed, Roche had said �Jacobins,� a word evidently so
unfamiliar to his interviewer that �jackal bins� was the best he could do
with
it in transcribing his notes.
Much ink has been spilled, a few gallons of it by me, in the struggle to
explain how and why a great �Establishment� representing so wide a
national
consensus could have been toppled so easily and so quickly by so small and
marginal a group as these �jackal bins.� In the domain of foreign affairs,
the
usual answer is the subject of my talk that night in Union Square:
Vietnam. In
this view, it was by deciding to fight an unpopular war that the
Establishment
rendered itself vulnerable.
But the problem is that Vietnam was a popular war. At the beginning, all
the
major media�from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from Time to
Newsweek, from CBS to ABC�supported our intervention. So did most of the
professoriate. And so did the public.
No matter. Even when all but one or two of the people who had either
directly
led us into Vietnam, or applauded our intervention, commenced falling all
over
themselves as they scampered to the head of the antiwar parade, public
opinion
continued supporting the war. But public opinion had ceased to count.
Indeed,
even reality itself had ceased to count. Consider the Tet offensive of
1968. It
was, as all now agree and some vainly struggled to insist then, a crushing
defeat for the Communists. But Walter Cronkite had only to declare it a
defeat
for us on the CBS Evening News, and a defeat it became.
Admittedly, in electoral politics, where numbers are decisive, public
opinion
remained potent. None of the doves contending for the presidency in 1968
or
1972 could beat Richard Nixon. But even Nixon felt it necessary to claim
that
he had a plan for getting us out of Vietnam.
In other words, on Vietnam, elite opinion trumped popular opinion. But its
effects were not restricted to foreign policy. They extended into a newly
antagonistic attitude toward America that ranged from skepticism about our
character and intentions to outright hatred of everything we were and
represented.
It hardly needs stressing that this attitude found a home in�to round up
the
usual suspects�the world of the arts, the universities, and the major
media of
news and entertainment, where intellectuals shaped by the Sixties, and
their
acolytes in the publishing houses of New York and in the studios of
Hollywood,
held sway.
But it would be a serious mistake to suppose that the trickle-down effect
of
the professoriate�s attitude was confined to literature, journalism, and
show
business. John Maynard Keynes once said that �Practical men who believe
themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are
usually the
slaves of some defunct economist.� Keynes was referring specifically to
businessmen. But practical functionaries like bureaucrats and
administrators
were subject to the same rule, though they tended to be the slaves not of
economists but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and
novelists
who were very much alive even when their ideas had, or should have, become
defunct.
It was by no means necessary for the practical men to have studied the
works in
question, or even ever to have heard of the authors of those works. All
they
had to do was read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets,
or
go to the movies�and drip by insidious drip, a more easily assimilable
form of
the original material would be absorbed into their heads and their nervous
systems.
These, in sum, are some of the factors that make me wonder whether
September
11, 2001 will have turned out to mark a genuine turning point comparable
to
December 7, 1941. I was not quite twelve years old when President
Roosevelt
declared war right after Pearl Harbor, but I remember the period well, and
I
cannot recall so much as a peep of protest out of the isolationists who
had
previously opposed our entry into that great conflict. And it was in order
to
learn better how to defeat the enemy, not to love or justify him, that the
Germans and the Japanese now became more intensive subjects of study.
Now here we are in the early days of another war that may well be
supported by
an even larger percentage of the public than Vietnam was at the beginning.
Today, however, the numerically insignificant opposition is stronger than
it
was in the early days of Vietnam. The reason is that it now maintains a
tight
grip over the institutions that had been surrendered to the anti-American
Left
by the end of the 60�s.
Take, for a start, the literary community, which can stand in for the
world of
the arts in general. No sooner had the Twin Towers been toppled and the
Pentagon smashed than a fierce competition began for the gold in the anti-
American Olympics. Or perhaps the race was with Osama bin Laden for the
Nobel
Peace Prize. (After all, if that prize could be given to the contemporary
godfather of terrorism, Yasser Arafat, why not to Bin Laden?)
One of my old ex-friends, Susan Sontag, seized an early lead in this
contest
with a piece in The New Yorker, in which she asserted that 9/11 was an
attack �undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and
actions.� Not content with that, she went on to compare the congressional
expressions of support for what she characterized as our �robotic
President�
to �the unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet
Party
Congress.�
But another of my old ex-friends, Norman Mailer, who had been
uncharacteristically slow out of the starting gate, soon came up strong on
the
inside by comparing the Twin Towers to �two huge buck teeth,� and
pronouncing
the ruins at Ground Zero �more beautiful than the buildings were.� Still
playing the enfant terrible even as he was closing in on his eightieth
year to
heaven, Mailer gathered steam in denouncing us as �cultural oppressors and
aesthetic oppressors� of the Third World. And in what did this oppression
consist? It consisted, he expatiated, in our establishing �enclaves of our
food
out there, like McDonald�s� and in putting �our high-rise buildings� in
around
the airports of even �the meanest, scummiest, capital[s] in the world.�
So much for the literary community. Then there was the campus, to which I
am
tempted to apply Hamlet�s words: �Fie on it! O fie! �tis an unweeded
garden,/
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.� A
report issued shortly after 9/11 by the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni, or ACTA�whose founding chairman was Lynne V. Cheney�cited about a
hundred malodorous statements wafting out of campuses all over the country
that
resembled Sontag and Mailer in blaming the attacks not on the terrorists
but on
America.
I realize that the stench emitted from the groves of academe has long
since
penetrated into all our nostrils. But I think another whiff would sharpen
our
sense of the noxious weeds still flourishing there that could, under the
right
circumstances, grow to a truly monstrous size. Here, then, are three
typical
samples:
>From a professor at the University of New Mexico: �Anyone who can blow up
the
Pentagon gets my vote.�
>From a professor at Rutgers: �[We] should be aware that the ultimate cause
[of
9/11] is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.�
And from a professor at the University of Massachusetts: �[The American
flag]
is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and
oppression.�
When the ACTA report was issued, cries of �McCarthyism��that first refuge
of a
left-wing scoundrel�were heard throughout the land. A New York Times
editorial
later chimed in with the epithet �repugnant.� Yet what repelled the Times
about
the report was not statements like the ones I have just cited. It was that
ACTA, had �attacked dozens of professors for having reacted to the
terrorist
attacks in ways its authors considered inappropriate.�
Inappropriate! One could scarcely find a better current illustration of
what
George Orwell meant when he wrote in 1946 that �In our time political
speech
and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.� And I cannot
resist
revisiting Orwell�s much-circulated crack about a comparably demented
piece of
anti-American vitriol that a leftist British intellectual spewed out
during
World War Two: �One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things
like
that,� said Orwell; �no ordinary man could be such a fool.�
But much as I revere Orwell, I prefer a homelier version of the same
crack,
whose author was the aunt of Saul Bellow. After overhearing a passionate
ideological dispute around her own kitchen table between the future Nobel
laureate for literature and his radical friends from the University of
Chicago,
she remarked: �Smart, smart, smart�stupid.�
Like the professors in the ACTA report, Susan Sontag, too, claimed that
her
freedom of speech was being placed in jeopardy. In this peculiar reading
of the
First Amendment, she is free to say anything she likes, but the right to
free
speech ends where criticism of what she has said begins.
Actually, with rare exceptions, the only attempts to stifle dissent on the
campus were directed at the many students and the few faculty members who
supported the 9/11 war. All these attempts could be encapsulated into a
single
phenomenon: on a number of campuses, students or professors who displayed
American flags or patriotic posters were forced to take them down.
As for Susan Sontag�s freedom of speech, I have in my possession a file
several
inches thick containing transcripts of fawning interviews with her in
periodicals and on television programs after her New Yorker piece
appeared.
And speaking of television, it was soon inundated with material presenting
Islam in the most glowing terms. Mainly, these programs took their cue
from the
President and other political leaders. Out of the best of motives, and for
prudential reasons as well, elected officials were striving mightily to
deny
that the war against terrorism was a war against Islam. They therefore
never
ceased heaping praises on the beauties of that religion, about which few
of
them knew anything.
But it was from the universities, not from the politicians, that the
substantive content of the broadcasts derived, in interviews with Muslim
academics whose accounts of Islam were�how shall I put it?�selectively
roseate.
Sometimes they were even downright untruthful, especially in sanitizing
the
doctrine of jihad or holy war, or in misrepresenting the extent to which
leading Muslim clerics all over the world had been celebrating suicide
bombers
as heroes and martyrs.
I do not bring this up in order to enter into a theological dispute. My
purpose, rather, is to offer another case study in the continued workings
of
the trickle-down effect I have already described. Thus, almost within
hours
after 9/11, the universities began adding innumerable courses on Islam to
their
curricula. On the campus, understanding Islam inevitably translated into
apologetics for it, and most of the media dutifully followed suit. The
media
also adopted the stance of neutrality between the terrorists and ourselves
that
prevailed among the relatively moderate professoriate, as when the major
television networks ordered their anchors to avoid exhibiting
partisanship.
Here the great exception was the Fox News Channel. The New York Times ran
an
article deploring the fact that Fox was covering the war from�O the
horror! The
horror!�a frankly pro-American perspective. But the Times was relieved
that no
other network had so cavalierly discarded the sacred conventions dictating
that
journalists, in the words of the president of ABC News, must �maintain
their
neutrality in times of war.�
It is important to note that a few voices on the Right also blamed America
for
having been attacked. Speaking on Pat Robertson�s TV program, the Reverend
Jerry Falwell delivered himself of the view that God was punishing the
United
States for the moral decay exemplified by a variety of liberal groups
among us.
Both later apologized for singling out these groups, but each continued to
insist that God was withdrawing His protection from America because all of
us
had become such great sinners.
On the secular Right, we had the columnist Robert Novak, along with that
born-
again Coughlinite Pat Buchanan. In the opinion of these two, and others of
like
mind, it was not our disobedience to divine law but our friendliness
toward
Israel that had brought this attack upon us. That bin Laden had never been
much
concerned with the Palestinians made no difference to Buchanan and Novak:
they
knew better.
For the moment, though, the major fount of the oppositional action
remained on
the Left, and it was mainly holed up in the universities. There, Eric
Foner, a
professor of history at my own alma mater, Columbia, was perhaps the most
prominent among those who tried to turn the tables on ACTA by risibly
condemning it for trying �to enforce a particular party line on American
colleges and universities.� Foner also condemned the report as misleading,
since the polls proved that there was �firm support� for the war among
college
students. �If our aim is to indoctrinate students with unpatriotic
beliefs,�
Foner smirked, �we�re obviously doing a very poor job of it.� Well, we
know
that parents who shell out $35,000 a year to universities like Columbia
are not
getting their money�s worth, but in this one perverse respect, at least,
we and
they can be grateful for it.
Yet even at the height of the radical fevers on the campus in the Sixties,
only
a minority of students sided with the antiwar radicals. But though they
were in
the majority, the non-radical students were unable to make themselves
heard
above the antiwar din, and whenever they tried, they were shouted down.
So it was on the campus after 9/11. There were, here and there, brave
defiers
of the academic orthodoxies. But mostly, the silent majority remained,
well,
silent, for fear of incurring the disapproval of their teachers, or even
punished for such crimes as �insensitivity.�
The confidence in America, and American virtue, that became nearly
universal
during the Second World War had enough momentum to carry us into the very
different war that we waged against Soviet totalitarianism. And it was
strong
enough to create the consensus I described a while back. But it was not
strong
enough to withstand the assault upon it I also sketched out some moments
ago.
Will the consensus that spontaneously materialized on 9/11 succeed in
resisting
the similar assault that began being mounted against it within hours by
the
guerrillas-with-tenure in the universities, along with their spiritual and
political disciples scattered throughout other quarters of our culture?
Can
this �tiny handful of ageing Rip van Winkles,� as they were breezily
brushed
off by one commentator, grow into a force as powerful as the �jackal bins�
of
yesteryear?
The answer no doubt depends primarily both on whether�God forbid�we are
hit
again by terrorists, and on how well the military side of the war will go.
Thus, antiwar activity on some campuses was dampened by our mind-boggling
success in Afghanistan. On the other hand, the mopping-up operation there
created an opportunity for more subtle forms of opposition to gain
traction.
Complaints began being raised about alleged tramplings of civil liberties
here
at home, and then about the treatment of detainees in Guantanamo.
Though soon shown to be almost entirely baseless and even preposterous, I
suppose some people raised these concerns in good faith. But it is also
true
that such issues could and did serve as a respectable cover for opposition
to
further military action. This is how it worked during Vietnam, when
demonstrably false accusations of war crimes were lodged against certain
lawful
American military tactics, were uncritically accepted as proved, and were
then
used as a potent weapon by the antiwar movement.
Be that as it may, of one thing we can be sure: as the war widens,
opposition
will widen along with it. We could already see this happening after
President
Bush spoke of an �axis of evil� in his State of the Union speech two weeks
ago.
In this single image the President brilliantly defined our present enemies
as a
fusion of those we fought in World War Two with the evil empire we battled
in
World War Three, which is the name Eliot A. Cohen has rightly suggested we
give
to the cold war. The President now promised an expansion of the war to
regimes
that may or may not have been directly involved in 9/11 but whose leaders
were
preparing to threaten us with weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, he
declared that he would if necessary attack them preemptively. And he
reiterated
that we would prefer to fight with allies, but that if we had to, we would
go
it alone.
As well we might have to do, given the anger and contempt this wonderfully
bold
declaration aroused throughout the world. Even the Europeans, after
offering us
their condolences over 9/11, could scarcely let a decent interval pass
before
going back into the ancient family business of trying to prove how vastly
superior in wisdom and finesse they were to us. Now they mocked the
President
as �simplistic,� while urging that our military operations end with
Afghanistan, and that we leave the rest to diplomacy in deferential
consultation with the great masters of that recondite art in Paris and
Brussels.
At home, much the same position was expressed by the New York Times and
other
publications ranging from the Center to the hard Left. In these precincts
the
President was hit for recklessness and overreaching, while terms redolent
of
Vietnam like �slippery slope� and �quagmire� were resurrected. Yet unlike
the
antiwar movement during Vietnam, which was almost completely made up of
leftists and liberals, today�s developing opposition resembles the one we
had
during the run-up to the Gulf War. That is, it is forging a coalition of
the
hard Left, elements of the soft Left, and sectors of the American Right.
In a pungent foretaste of this bizarre ideological cocktail, Michael
Kinsley on
the soft Left allied himself with Pat Buchanan on the hard Right in
indicting
the President for evading the Constitution by proposing to fight
undeclared
wars. Meanwhile, the same charge was moving into the political mainstream
through Democratic Senators like Byrd, along with complaints from Tom
Daschle
about the concept of an �axis of evil,� from which his advisers only last
night
persuaded him to retreat somewhat. Only last night, too, Al Gore endorsed
the
concept, but�like some Republican Senators earlier�he simultaneously
endorsed
the whining over American �unilateralism� in the chancelleries and
chattering
classes of Europe. There, it seems, they agree that an axis of evil does
actually exist, but it is made up not of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but
of
Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice. Anyhow, all the
toing-and-froing by
the politicians was accompanied by a thousand reasons as to why the Bush
Doctrine in its present form was the wrong way to go.
As this kind of thing metastasizes, a great responsibility will fall upon
those
of us who stand in awe of the moral courage and the strategic clarity
President
Bush has increasingly drawn out of his heart and soul and mind and guts
since
9/11. We will need to mobilize all our intellectual firepower to fight off
the
arguments against the Bush Doctrine, and to expose them for what they
really
are: appeasement and defeatism traveling under other names.
Here an analogy with World War Three may be illuminating. I believe that
Ronald
Reagan led us into victory in that war by reversing the post-Vietnam
decline of
American military might and resuming a vigorous ideological struggle
against
the �evil empire.� For this he too, like President Bush today, was
ridiculed as
a simpleton and a �cowboy.� Which is why I also believe that no one
campaigning
on such promises could have been elected in 1979, and then could have
prevailed
in office over his political foes, if the ground had not been prepared by
the
neoconservative intellectuals who had for more than ten years been waging
a
fierce war of ideas against their former colleagues on the Left.
To be sure, the neoconservative contingent was preceded by conservatives
to the
manner born�and all honor to them. But the neoconservatives constituted a
fresh
wave of reinforcements. And because they possessed a more intimate fix on
the
positions of their old political allies, they were able to mount a newly
aggressive offensive against the defamation of America by the Left, while
effectively revivifying the case for regarding the Soviet Union as, yes,
an
evil empire.
My contention is that 9/11 will have given rise to a genuine
transformation
only if, once again, the military forces we deploy are undergirded by an
equally formidable intellectual campaign. Maybe the 9/11 Kronstadters will
eventually take on this job. So far, however, they seem to be stopping
short of
a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the assumptions behind their old
faith
in America the ugly.
Hence, for the time being, if�in a phrase I am borrowing from Matthew
Arnold
who borrowed it from the Gospel of Luke��the one thing needful� is to be
done,
we old soldiers and our younger colleagues will have to do it pretty much
on
our own. But here is a hot news flash: forty-eight scholars, some of them
fellow old soldiers who are with us tonight, have only just issued an open
letter supporting the war. Their statement is a very welcome counter to
the
dogmas on the campus. But it is, I fear, a little too defensive to satisfy
the
full demands of �the one thing needful.�
What are those demands? To describe them in language I have frequently
used
before, but that cannot be repeated too often, they are, first, to remind
ourselves, and then to teach our woefully miseducated children, that this
country enjoys more freedom and more prosperity more widely shared than
any
nation in the history of the world. It has thereby earned a place for
itself
among the greatest of all human civilizations.
We need, after dwelling for so long on what may be wrong with us, to
remember,
and to celebrate, how much more is right and good and noble. We need to
realize
that the answer to the plaintively asked question �Why do they hate us?�
is not
for whatever crimes we may have committed, but for our accomplishments and
our
virtues.
Correlatively, we need to understand more clearly that these
accomplishments
and virtues have their source in the institutions designed by our Founding
Fathers�institutions that have, just as they hoped, conduced to �the
preservation of the blessings of liberty� for their posterity. Which is to
say,
us.
I for one pray that our victory in this war�World War Four�will result in
the
creation of conditions under which the same blessings can be heaped upon
as
many countries as possible. And I pray that it will set Islam onto a path
of
reformation from within. Both Judaism and Christianity began undergoing
such a
process centuries ago. Why should Islam alone remain forever exempt?
�America! America!��sang Katharine Lee Bates in 1893��God shed his grace
on
thee.� Appealing to God to shed the same grace on the rest of the world
can no
doubt be taken as a call for American imperialism. I confess that the word
imperialism does not frighten me, but since a term like �leadership� would
be
less incendiary, I will resort to it.
In advocating such leadership by America, I do not make light of the
widespread
doubts that this country, by its very nature, is endowed either with the
will
or the skill to play even a benevolently imperial role in the world. But
then
the cadences of George F. Kennan in 1947 spring reassuringly back into my
ears.
To my delight, I heard echoes of his words in President Bush�s State of
the
Union speech, both in how it began and in how it concluded. But Kennan�s
more
eloquent formulation remains the locus classicus here, and so I want to
conclude by quoting it once more, in an updated form as applicable to
World War
IV as the original was to World War III:
The thoughtful observer of Islamic terrorism will�experience a certain
gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with
this
implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent
on
their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of
moral
and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.
To which, surely, the only fitting response is a very loud and a very
resonant
Amen.
Libertarian Socialist News
Post Office Box 12244
Silver Spring, MD 20908
http://www.overthrow.com
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(Formerly http://www.libertariansocialist.com)
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