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Stefan
Herpel finds the hawks' logic wanting. Gulf War II Meanwhile, on the Anti-war Front by Stephen Cox The only trouble
with the anti-war movement is that it's populated with left-wing
twits.
In recent months, as I've watched the small fluctuations
in the opinion polls regarding public attitudes toward the president's hand-ling
of Iraq, I've often wondered how different the numbers might be if the anti-war
movement were not, in essence, an anti-Bush, anti-Republican movement. Each day,
I receive a torrent of anti-war emails; each day, I hear anti-war speeches on
television and radio. The great majority of these messages are mere diatribes or
rants, shrieks of anger against the president. They take for granted all the
notions they need to prove: the idea that Bush is provoking war simply to grab
Near East oil; the idea that he is "fixated" and "obsessed" with "world
domination"; the idea that he is a "racist" who nonchalantly "plans to kill
500,000 Iraqi children," and many ideas of like temper.
| | Stephen
Cox is a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego
and the author of "The Titanic Story." |
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None of this rhetoric surfaced in response to President Clinton's attacks on
Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, or Yugoslavia. On those occasions, in fact, very little
anti-war rhetoric surfaced at all, except as emitted by the stray libertarian or
conservative isolationist. I cannot recall a single Democratic congressman
showing up on TV to tell us that war never solved anything, or to ask how many
children must be killed before the president had his way. This says something
about the tendency of domestic politics to drive foreign politics in the United
States. To realize that if Bush were in favor of abortion and against school
prayer and capital punishment, millions of anti-war voices would be hushed —
that is a strange realization, and an ominous one, no matter what you think of
the specific merits of the case for attacking Iraq.
More clearly than ever before, I believe, the great liability of the anti-war
movement is . . . the anti-war movement. It is a movement that programmatically
refuses to separate itself from radical left-wing sentiment. As far as I can
tell, the leaders of the great majority of public demonstrations are motivated by
the agenda of the hard left and are using Bush's preparations for war against
Iraq (overtly a fascist dictatorship) as an exhilarating new way of combatting
capitalism and the Republican Party. When Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes
interviewed two leaders of the recent school walkout-in-protest-of, one of the
two responded to questions about what kind of war he would support by
listing World War II (of course) and Castro's revolution (oh, really?). The other
one sat listening with an inane smile on his face. Of course, the whole idea of
walking out of high school and college classes to protest a war is
incomprehensible except in terms of a protest against established institutions
that is merely adopting one particular war as an excuse.
It's not just the organization of the anti-war movement that's in question.
It's the disreputable character of its personnel. The Senate's great spouter of
anti-war views is Teddy Kennedy, that lifelong apostle of peace and exemplar of
human dignity. The media's great exponents of pacifism are a little mob of
Hollywood stars who think that the way to stop war is to get their followers to
jam congressional offices with calls and faxes, thus relieving themselves of the
inconvenience of showing up in person to display their self-righteousness. When
two Los Angeles radio guys urged their listeners to retaliate by doing the same
thing to the business offices of the stars, they were threatened with legal
action to get the FCC to prevent them from mounting such protests. Thus do the
important people in Hollywood defend (other) Americans' right to dissent and
engage in peaceful, though annoying, protest.
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| Oh, I see. Writing a
shelf of insipid historical novels and catty books of essays constitutes proof of
seniority in the Americanism department. |
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No, I'm not talking about any of the good arguments against this war, or war
in general. I may not buy them all, but they certainly exist. You'd never know
it, though, once the current anti-war gang got going. The text of their little
drama is so contemptible — a mishmash of sentiments about war always being
the worst option (again, oh really?), predictions of calamity, and the
aforementioned slanders of Bush — that one immediately turns to the subtext.
In most cases, this is the argument that we, or at least I, am obviously smarter
than you, or at least he (the president), so therefore I should be running the
country and determining its foreign policy. There is no other way to explain
Senator Kennedy's remarks, ever. There is no other way to explain the angry
prattle that one hears on NPR and PBS. And there is no other way to explain such
phenomena as . . . Gore Vidal.
Can there really be such a person? Listening to him being interviewed, one
weighs the odds, and considers it probable that there isn't one. An opportunity
to do so occurred on March 5, when the real or supposed Vidal visited Alan
Colmes' radio show. Colmes, a modern-liberal opponent of the war, kept trying to
make sense of what Gore was saying, and Gore kept preventing him from making any.
Gore's theme was the stupidity or evil of the president; his evidence was the
allegation that no fighter planes were scrambled on 9/11 until after all the
damage had been done. This isn't true, but never mind — what was his point?
He refused to say that he was accusing Bush of being the kind of leader who plots
to destroy the lives of thousands of fellow-citizens in order to concoct a crisis
in foreign affairs. Oh, no, he wasn't saying that. He wasn't one of "you people"
(journalists) who know nothing of "fact" and deal only in "opinion." Well, Colmes
asked, aren't you giving us your opinion? No, I'm giving you the facts. But
aren't you suggesting an opinion? No, just the facts. But aren't you
insinuating an opinion? No! No! No! Well, then, why are you on my
show?
One thing led to another, and Vidal announced that he, Vidal, had always been
a good American, better than "most other people" in this country. Curiously,
Colmes then accused him of arrogance, to which accusation he replied, "I've spent
my whole life writing about America." Oh, I see. Writing a shelf of insipid
historical novels and catty books of essays constitutes proof of seniority in the
Americanism department. When callers finally intervened in the by-then very
embittered discussion, it emerged that Vidal's alleged facts about the airplanes
weren't facts at all. But that didn't matter: he was still correct, in his
own eyes.
With opponents like that, is it any wonder, any wonder at all, that the
president does so well in the polls?
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