Noonan stands by her severe criticism of Bush inaugural

She’s back. Peggy Noonan, Republican loyalist (and you can’t get loyaler) defends her very welcome attack last week on Bush’s inaugural speech, and is even more critical of it than she was before. There’s too much here to summarize, so I’ll just highlight two points. First, she feels that Bush’s declaration of war against tyranny everywhere will only exacerbate our problems:

Now we are up against not an organized state monolith but dozens, hundreds and thousands of state and nonstate actors—nuts with nukes, freelance bioterrorists, Islamofascists, independent but allied terror groups. The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don’t have to summon more.

This echoes what I wrote in my article, “National Defense or Global Empire?”, in October 2002, that the Moslems hate us for reasons we can’t change, but that we exacerbate and justify their fear and hatred of us with our truly threatening global democratism:

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying, as anti-Americans on both the right and the left say, that the radical Muslim threat is only a defensive response to American imperialism. I fully recognize the totalitarian character and the global aspirations of Jihadism, and the urgent necessity for us to combat it and contain it. But America, as we’ve seen, has been evolving its own set of globalist aspirations. So I ask the reader this question. If America were not trying to create, in Charles Krauthammer’s terrifying words, a “super-sovereign West, economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in the world”; and if this American hegemony were not the carrier of a radical individualism that breaks down all cultural and religious values; and, furthermore, if we were not simultaneously admitting entire populations of Muslims into America, thus increasing the pressures of our hyper-individualist culture on theirs, isn’t it just possible that America would seem a good deal less threatening and hateful to many Muslims?

Noonan makes another point we’ve barely heard from Republicans, that there’s too much loyalty around Bush, a “band of brothers” aspect, and that this is the reason that terrible speech didn’t get stopped. She approvingly quotes John F. Kennedy, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” While I am not a Republican or a Democrat, I can only say, right on, Peggy. Just in the last couple of days, I’ve received strongly worded e-mails from readers telling me I shouldn’t criticize the president in time of war. Well, when this “war” has no shape, no defined enemy, no achievable goal, and is apparently going to continue until the whole world suits the ideological demands of George W. Bush and the neoconservatives, meaning that it will continue forever, the stricture not to criticize the president during war means that we can never criticize the president again. Sometimes loyalty asks too much.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 27, 2005 10:21 AM | Send