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William Kristol seems to embrace the harshest charges against himself
In his column on the meaning of the election, William Kristol drops two extraordinarily inappropriate and perhaps revealing remarks.
[H]ow doubly sweet the joy felt by the president’s supporters after those same (misleading) exit polls had plunged them—us—into 12 long hours of anxious gloom. “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” Churchill quipped. This week millions of Republicans know just what he was talking about.Almost losing an election is the same as having a bullet whistle by your head in battle and not being hit? Is Kristol serious? What makes it worse is that Kristol is among a group that has often been savaged, unfairly I think, as “chickenhawks,” that is, as people who support war but haven’t served in the armed forces themselves. The chickenhawk charge is a cheap shot, first, because it would mean that no one who hasn’t served in the military would have a right to an opinion about a war, and, second, because the very people making the charge would instantly drop it if there was a war that they themselves supported. Nevertheless, the charge has often been made, with fury and passion, and Kristol has surely heard it. So what’s going on here? Is he so deluded that he actually thinks his own experience of nervously watching election returns on tv is the moral equivalent of serving in battle? Or is he, in a gesture of arrogant defiance toward his critics, deliberately embracing the image of himself as a chickenhawk? Kristol’s second inappropriate remark also involves an invocation of war-like imagery. After advising Bush to take Kerry up on his generous-sounding call for bipartisanship, Kristol adds:
But true statesmanship, and the landmark achievements that attend it, demand something more. L’audace, toujours l’audace, said Danton.Once again, Kristol seems almost wilfully to be confirming an accusation frequently made by his critics. Just as he has often been called a chickenhawk, and now goes out of his way to make himself seem like one, he has often been called a neo-Jacobin (that is, a leftist ideologue seeking global revolution to bring the whole world under a single uniform system), and now he approvingly quotes, of all people, a Jacobin leader of the French Terror.
Are Kristol’s verbal self-indulgences in this article symptomatic of a simple lack of awareness of the implications of what he’s saying, or are they indicative of a conscious decision, born of overweening chutzpah triggered in turn by Bush’s election victory, to throw the damning truth about himself back in his enemies’ faces? You decide. Comments
While for many the charge of “chickenhawk” is a cheapshot, it has a particular salience for Bill Kristol, a man who’s never come across a war he didn’t like and is a big advocate of reinstating the draft. Posted by: Derek Copold on November 5, 2004 2:28 PMFirst, let us not forget that over a year ago, Kristol wrote in the Washington Post that hispanic immigration was making this country more left-wing, which didn’t seem to bother him much. I would like to say my piece about the chickenhawk accusation. I graduated high school in 1968 and went to college. Most of my classmates in my rural Tennessee high school went into the military, most went to Vietnam. Two of my friends were killed there. I had some relatives in Vietnam, as well. My own view was that it was an unnecessary war and distracted from the Cold War against the Soviet Union. So, I didn’t enlist. A cousin of mine came back one day and addressed a geometry class at our high school in 1967. He told some hair-raising war stories, saying the war was basically unwinnable. “Those people don’t even want us there,” he said. So did practically every guy I knew who was in Vietnam. I believe that criticizing people like Kristol and Rush Limbaugh (who used his prominent father’s influence to avoid the draft in 1970) for being so enthusiastic about war in middle age, while staying out of a war in their youth is legitimate criticism. I was listening to Rush on the day the Iraq invasion started. He was laughing, “Whoo boy I love it!” Does El Rushbo think war is funny? Kristol often writes in the terms Mr. Auster mentioned above, saying “Crush and destroy the enemy,” as if he enjoys it. R. Emmett Tyrell, in a column before the invasion, taunted those who use the chickenhawk term saying in effect, “Yes-We’re chickenhawks but we’re winning.” I don’t think it embarrases these people in their insufferable arrogance. Most of these characters are big “immigration enthusiasts” as well. Finally, I recognize that there are men my age who weren’t in Vietnam who supported the Iraq War in a responsible fashion. I thought it was a mistake, that Saddam Hussein was finished anyway. I wrote on this Forum two years ago, that Bush would bring as much of the Iraqi population to this country as possible, in itself a good reason to oppose the war. Posted by: David on November 5, 2004 2:55 PMI agree with David. The three examples under discussion here: Kristol, Limbaugh, and Tyrell seem to have a remarkably flippant attitude towrds war, as if such a horrendous thing were simply another policy option that could be indulged in at whim. They deserve to be criticized for this, which isn’t the same thing as the type of charge Mr. Auster refers to that is encountered among some who have served in the military: that those with military service are the only ones entitled to discuss the issue. By that logic, John Kerry would be far more qualified over Bush because he did spend time in a combat zone and actually participated in combat operations. I can name two politicians whose combat records are unimpeachable, but ended up being detrimental to the US. George McGovern and John McCain. Posted by: Carl on November 5, 2004 3:32 PMI can think of some other “conservatives” who have also expressed attitudes toward war which are at least strange if not flippant — Victor Davis Hanson, who sometimes comes across as a modern von Bernhardi, and William Safire. I vividly recall Safire writing about the Falklands war as a splendid little war, much as if it were a sporting event. The old National Review type paleos hardly ever sounded like this. Posted by: Alan Levine on November 5, 2004 4:06 PMMaybe Kristol is engaging in some Straussian “secret writing”? Posted by: Paul Cella on November 5, 2004 10:40 PMI wonder what we might hear if we were to play the sound track of Fox News Sunday backwards? :-) Posted by: Matt on November 5, 2004 10:52 PMEver hear of the word “metaphor” Lawrence? Posted by: Gary on November 6, 2004 9:32 AM |