Hugh Hewitt has written and broadcast repeatedly questioning the Iraq withdrawal strategy proposed by the Democrats. Other bloggers have also written persuasive posts discussing the consequences of retreat and the way in which the enemy will take advantage of it. They talk about mass slaughter in Iraq and how it will free up enemy fighters to pursue the same tactics in Afghanistan, where we would presumably withdraw again, whereupon those fighters would be freed up to pursue us somewhere else.
They are talking to themselves. There's no one on the other side who can hear what they say because they're speaking a foreign language.
To the Left, it's not Islamofascists that is our enemy, it is conflict itself that is the enemy. When you ask, "If we lost, then who won?" the question is nonsensical becausee to them, in war, no one wins. The reason that only American deaths are reported by the left-leaning MSM is that it shows, over and over again, that war is bad.
Not only is conflict the enemy, but moral judgment is the enemy to the Left as well. The reason that Abu Ghraib was on the front page of the New York Times for 40+ days was that it showed how we were no different than the Islamofascists. That's also the source of fascination with the "torture" going on at Guantanamo Bay. It's why a preposterously stupid story about flushing Korans got published in Newsweek. This is why some on the Left support financial aid to the Palestinians despite their election of genocidal loons. Who are we to judge?
Harry Reid's goal is to stop all conflicts because there is no end result worth acts of violence. If that is your goal, then withdrawing from Iraq is a clear path to success. He does not see a human enemy in any of this so questions about what the "enemy" will do are nonsensical to him.
Meanwhile, the Right goes on yelling about tactics and strategies and winning and losing with no effect on the debate at all. The underlying debate, one which is not occurring and needs to occur, is about good and evil. Do they exist? Can you define them? Is one or the other dominant in a particular culture or country? Until you have that debate out in the open, the current one will go nowhere.
9 comments:
You know I love you, Cat and Hamster, but come on: "In war, no one wins."
Seems to me that America and the Allies DID win World War II, and the entire planet "won" because the forces of evil were stopped and defeated.
Seriously.
David,
I completely agree with you. I'm just laying out the underlying perspective of the retreat crowd.
Wars in the dim past are romanticized by the Left. All of the friendly fire incidents and tactical and strategic mistakes that cause such hysteria today are glossed over in wars like WW II.
Cat,
GREAT post. Very well put.
James
No, the right hasn't completely missed the point, the point is that the West is under attack, and not just the West, in Indonesia, Thailand, all over the world, and yes conflict is awful but when you're under attack you have a choice, fight back or roll over. Conflict isn't the enemy, it's the means by which you defend yourself against the real enemy.
The left disparages Christianity and excuses a vicious medieval Theocracy in the cause of not being judgemental. And after this totalitarian manifestation is defeated, there may well be another one, the totalitarian mindset will always be around, and the idea of promoting democracy is that it is the only known longterm safeguard against this.
'We sleep safely in out beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.' Orwell.
Ligneus,
I'm afraid my post on the Right not getting it was very poorly written since both you and another commenter misunderstood it.
I was not saying that fighting Islamofascists was wrong, I was saying that our arguments carry no weight with the Left because they speak an entirely different language than we do.
I hope you haven't filed me under "loonies" and you keep visiting. I always enjoy your comments.
Firstly, I have posted on this on my blog and I wasn't very kind about it, unfortunately my comments aren't working so you can't have back at me.
So I'm sorry if I misunderstood it, I thought you were advocating the views stated. We should read more carefully and I must say I was somewhat disappointed that you would have written such things. I shall post haste add an explanation to my post.
I do think though that expecting some sort of rapprochement between the right and left these days is as futile as expecting it between the Islamofascists and the Anglosphere.
Because basically the Islamos and the left are plainly wrong, which is saying they are on the same side! Which the right has figured out.
I have just started reading a book by David Solway, a Canadian poet, writer, professor and intellectual type called The Big Lie. [The book that is.] He was one of the lefties 'mugged by reality' on 9/11 and he set out to examine his beliefs, he says: 'I can only reiterate that before 9/11 I was solidly in the camp of those against whom I am now litigating. I read Chomsky with approval, harboured duly anti-American sentiments, abominated GWB and Ariel Sharon, commiserated with the Palestinians, subscribed to the appropriate dailies and agreed with the political slant taken by our major news networks.'
He then concludes he was wrong on just about everything. So the left isn't a total lost cause. Very good book and he's an excellent poet too.
Ligneus,
I did try and go back and comment on your site; I value your comments and readership that much.
I'm also a marketer, so I see every problem through the eyes of a marketer. When the only tool you have is a hammer....
:-)
I also hearken back to an article written by P J O'Rourke about talk radio. He's a conservative and he was trying to figure out just who the conservative talk radio hosts were yelling at. He discovered, after listening for a while, they were yelling at him.
I suggest we spend too much time talking to ourselves and not enough comprehending what motivates the other side. I'm not such a pessimist as you on this.
By the way, I got the inspiration for this from No Pasaran's link to an Evan Sayet video. It's become the unified field theory of the Left for me.
Ha ha, 'when the only tool you have is a hammer..'
I'm a carpenter!
That being so, I sometimes wonder what I'm doing in the company of so many erudite people, but there you go, maybe sometimes my not quite so metaphorical hammer drives the point home.
Re the left/right divide, I take my clues for the difficulty in the two sides not 'hearing' each other from Thomas Sowell's 'A Conflict of Visions'. He goes back to Edmund Burke and co on one side who believed that people should be free within a framework of law and Rousseau and co on the other who thought that an elite knew best how people should live and had the arrogance to think that they could micro manage such a complex thing as 'society'.
On that subject, another favourite book of mine is Emergence by Steven Johnson which shows how everything from termites' nests, cities, the internet, to give a few examples, 'emerge' and are self organisation, the main mechanism being feedback.
I saw the Evan Sayet video, great! I must look it up again, my memory being somewhat 'holey' these days.
'self organising'
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