Here's The Difference

I have a great number of friends, both liberal and conservative, who opposed the Iraq war. They had a number of reasons for doing so.

In the months since the war began, I've debated the topic with many of them. A number of them have held forth about the issue of WMD at length, and how the mistakes made by U.S. intelligence, and acted upon by the President, have had a terrible impact on U.S. credibility.

This is a fair point. One can debate the culpability the President deserves for acting upon the intelligence, and one can also debate about the manner in which the war and resulting occupation were executed. In a democratic society, open debate should and must take place on such topics.

But there's a difference between having an honest debate and facing off with someone with one agenda. There are those who agree with me on the Iraq war who are unwilling to admit that mistakes were made, and simply attack those who dispute elements of the President's case for war and its execution as wishing Saddam were still in power. That may be true of some (even many) of those on the other side of the debate -- but it's certainly not true of all of them.

However, the other side's obsession with refusing to give President Bush credit for what he accomplished with the war is even more maddening.

A terrific example appears in the on-going debate between Sylvester Brown, Jr. of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Instapundit. My impression of the debate is that it's approximately as one-sided as a battle of wits between Keanu Reeves and Einstein, but let's cover the preliminaries.

In an April 14 column, Brown addressed the issue of reaching out to Republicans. He attempted to differentiate between members of the GOP who qualify as "straight shooters" and people like Richard Perle. This part of his column drew some attention...

I've noticed that comedian Bill Maher has been doing a bit of reaching out himself lately. Several times on his show, "Real Time with Bill Maher," he's encouraged more conservatives to join his audience. Maher's even conceded that his criticism of President George W. Bush's activities in Iraq may have been at least partly wrong.

"Look, on the long-range, big picture of getting the freedom-and-democracy ball rolling in the Middle East, maybe these guys had it right," Maher said on his show Friday.

Sounds to me like Maher's buying into the bait-and-switch rhetoric of the Bush clan. Maybe I would, too, if they were straight shooters. But, before the Iraq invasion, the rallying cry was against an "axis of evil" and "weapons of mass destruction." I don't recall any prewar speeches about delivering democracy to the Middle East.

Such statements used to go by with little more challenge than an outraged letter to the editor. Not anymore. Glenn Reynolds responded later the same day, specifically to the last sentance in the paragraphs I quoted above. Reynolds pointed out the 2003 State of the Union as one speech where the President put forth his vision for democracy in the Middle East, and other bloggers and e-mailers joined in.

Unlike many mainstream media columnists, Brown deserves credit for taking note of the criticism, although it did take a barrage of e-mails to get his attention. In his Sunday column, Brown admitted, somewhat grudgingly, that he had forgotten the lines Reynolds quoted from the 2003 SOTU. But then he fired off this closing volley...

The bloggers were partly correct. Bush has mentioned that a Saddam-free world and a democratic Iraq would have a ripple effect in the Middle East. But let's be honest, he mentioned those as the perks of war, not the reasons for war. And who could blame him? According to a 2003 Washington Post-ABC poll before Bush's speech, six out of 10 Americans harbored doubts about using force in Iraq. A solid 40 percent opposed any sort of invasion in the country. Bush played the "democracy" card lightly and the WMD card with a skillful hand.

But, hey, war over WMDs or war over democracy, let's not quibble. People hear what they want to hear. As a straight shooter, I have to confess my bias toward our government's new democracy delivery system. This is a country that 40 years ago restricted the right to vote, use public facilities or eat in restaurants to some of its citizens. It's a country with a long-standing record of supporting autocratic regimes and dictatorships and overthrowing democratically elected government officials around the world.

When did the United States become the chief exporter of democracy to the Arab world?

Sorry, bloggers. When it comes to regime change and nation-building, I can't follow the wisdom of Bush and his crew. I lean more toward the words of a real straight shooter, Mohandas Gandhi:

"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."

Wow. Such reasoned arguments make me wonder why Brown is writing for the Post-Dispatch instead of serving as U.N. Secretary General.

Reynolds accurately calls Brown on his "tired lefty tropes", but I think he's being too nice. Will Collier calls Brown on the carpet, and properly so...

Gandhi, of course, is the patron saint of pacifism for the Western Left. What they tend to leave out in quoting the above and other pacifistic platitudes is Gandhi's extremism, if his philosophies were carried out to their logical conclusions. Concerning the threat of Hitler's Germany, Gandhi counseled Winston Churchill to surrender peacably, and then pursue a strategy of non-violent resistance.

Now, you do know what happened to everybody who pursued non-violent resistance against the Nazis, don't you? What do you think the world would look like today, had Churchill and Roosevelt taken that advice?

Gandhi, like Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Martin Luther King, Jr. in this country, had one tremendous advantage in their own quite remarkable efforts--they were opposing governments and/or structures that were, in the end, ameniable to moral persuasion. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Saddam--these were not reasonable men who could be shamed or convinced into stepping down quietly and calling elections. These were barbaric monsters who recognized no higher morality than their own whims. Today's closest parallel to Gandhi is the Dalai Lama, and all his own pacifism has won for his people in Tibet is fifty years of brutal Chi-Com occupation, with no end in sight.

The WMD argument is a straw man in the context of Reynolds' point. It doesn't respond to Reynolds' legitimate point -- that Bush did indeed articulate the objective of establishing a democratic Iraq prior to the war. Brown overreached by trying to claim that Bush never outlined the goal of establishing democracy in the Middle East among his justifications for war. If you are Brown, you can argue that WMD and the war on terror were the true reasons Bush went into Iraq, which may be what he was attempting to do. But choosing to respond by pointing out other rationales for war is basically a red herring -- and a tired one at that.

The Left doesn't want to look at this situation objectively. Some of them cannot do so, because Bush made the decision to go to war. They have to believe that the war was wrong, and that any good things that come out of the war could have occurred without the war. Giving W. credit for anything is too much. Giving him credit for liberating several million people from a brutal dictator is impossible.

I've heard the idea that we're "imposing democracy" on others, and that this is not the way democracy succeeds. Somehow, I'm thinking that the people making these arguments would have been crying foul if we'd made the same statements in 1945 about the enemies we'd just defeated. The spirit of democracy has to exist within the populace as a whole -- but I would argue that it exists within the majority of people within all nations. I would also argue that it may not have any chance to succeed when it's brutally repressed by Nazis, Communists or Baathist strongmen.

Perhaps in some cases, peaceful non-violent resistance is the best way to effect change. In a democratic society, this certainly seems to be the case, as proven by King. But it's absurd and downright obscene to argue that the same principle applies in a dictatorship where those who dissent and push for democracy are butchered (along with their families) indiscriminately by the authorities, with absolutely no punishment for (and indeed, official sanction of) such actions.

"Straight shooters" like Mr. Brown need a reality check. Right now, they're way off the mark.