Assertive U.S. policy vindicated; anti-war party in denial

All along, the Anti-War Party has said that America’s toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime was at best a distraction from the war on terror. That argument has just been dramatically undercut by the agreement by Col. Khaddafi, a principal backer of international terror, to allow arms inspectors into Libya to oversee the destruction of its weapons of mass destruction programs. And it’s not only the weapons programs of Libya that are affected by Khaddafi’s startling turnabout, but the weapons programs of two of the three named members of the Axis of Evil. According to the Sunday Herald, Libya, Iran and North Korea were working together on a nuclear weapons program at a top-secret underground site near the Kufra Oasis of the Sahara in southeastern Libya. Moreover, it appears Khaddafi began his contacts with Britain leading to the agreement on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. It will be interesting to see if any members of the Anti-War Party acknowledge these remarkable benefits flowing from the Iraq war.

Since I drafted the above paragraph a couple of days ago, at least one inveterate Bush critic on the left has acknowledged Bush’s recent successes. Dana Milbank writes in the Washington Post:

It has been a week of sweet vindication for those who promulgated what they call the Bush Doctrine.

Beginning with the capture of Saddam Hussein a week ago and ending Friday with an agreement by Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi to surrender his unconventional weapons, one after another international problem has eased.

On Tuesday, the leaders of France and Germany set aside their long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq and agreed to forgive an unspecified amount of that country’s debt. On Thursday, Iran signed an agreement allowing surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities after European governments applied intense pressure on the U.S. foe. On Friday, Libya agreed to disarm under the watch of international inspectors, just as administration officials were learning that Syria had seized $23.5 million believed to be for al Qaeda.

To foreign policy hard-liners inside and outside the administration, the gestures by Libya, Iran and Syria, and the softening by France and Germany, all have the same cause: a show of American might.

Meanwhile, the Terminally Untalented Mr. Kerry continues to whirl in liberal sollipsisms. Concerning the recent Bush diplomatic successes, the Post article quoted him as follows:

Ironically, this significant advance represents a complete U-turn in the Bush administration’s overall foreign policy. An administration that scorns multilateralism and boasts about a rigid doctrine of military preemption has almost in spite of itself demonstrated the enormous potential for improving our national security through diplomacy.

The truth, of course, is that the administration never “scorned” multilateralism and never had a “rigid” doctrine of pre-emption. On the contrary, the administration strove with all its might to get UN support for an eventual war while trying and failing to get Iraqi compliance with the UN weapons inspections regime, was stabbed in the back by France and Germany after they had signed Resolution 1441, and as a result was forced to go to war without UN backing. But Kerry can’t acknowledge these simple, well-known facts, because in his view, America—insofar as it behaves as an independent sovereign nation—is inherently evil and inferior.

Meanwhile, among the intellectuals of the paleocon right, we see evasions of reality as remarkable as those coming from the knee-jerk liberal Sen. Kerry. Writing at Chronicles, Srdja Trifkovic (pronounced Serdyah Trifkovitch) just about accused that evil, evil neocon Paul Wolfowitz of treason for releasing a memo last week saying that countries that had sought to undermine America during the Iraq war would not get Iraqi reconstruction contracts. Trifkovic said the memo would so offend the Europeans that they would reject James Baker’s request that they release Iraq from its debts. In other words, Wolfowitz was deliberately seeking to destroy our relations with the Europeans by his timing of the release of the memo. According to Trifkovic, this was part of a neocon plot to separate the United States from Europe, in order that the neocon strategy of unilateral U.S. global dominance could proceed unhindered. Wolfowitz’s sabotaging of the administration’s diplomatic efforts was so serious, concluded Trifkovic, that if Bush didn’t fire Wolfowitz, “it is to be feared that America is no longer a normal country.”

I wrote to Mr. Trifkovic pointing out that according to the Washington Times, the release of the memo did not have the horrid results he had predicted, but just the opposite. The European countries had accepted Baker’s request that they lessen or release Iraq’s debt burdens. It thus appeared that the exercise of US muscle had produced a European rush to compliance with the U.S.

I continued:

It’s too bad that paleoconservatives have become so reactively hostile to the present government of the U.S. that they’ve begun to think exactly like liberals, seeing America as always in the wrong, seeing any use of power by the U.S. as always wrong, regardless of the facts. Not trying to understand events as they really are, but simply fitting every event into a preconceived pattern of evil neocons. I wonder how long this paleocon bigotry is going to last before it burns itself out.

Which doesn’t mean one should support the neocons in everything they do; I am a strong critic of the neocons and I oppose almost everything Bush has done as president, except for the war. But the paleocons’ automatic hatred of the neocons and of Bush has made them close to intellectually useless.

Mr. Trifkovic replied to the news of European compliance on the Iraqi debts issue in much the same manner that Kerry responded to the news of Bush’s successes vis à vis Libya. He claimed that the Europeans’ accommodating posture was actually a nod to the more diplomatic Bush 41 people like James Baker, and a rebuff to Wolfowitz’s exercise of muscle. I wrote to him again:

This gets awfully complicated. Your column predicted the ruin of American-European relations as a result of the release of the memo, a ruin that you said was the evil Wolfowitz’s conscious aim. But now that the opposite of the ruin you predicted has occurred, you’re still claiming that this confirms your original prediction.

Thus we see, on both the left and the right, the continuing stark refusal to recognize facts that go against one’s anti-war, anti-Bush preconceptions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2003 12:06 PM | Send