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Battle Cries
 Quagmire? Did someone say quagmire? Not
President Bush. He sees “real progress” in Iraq. This is no time
to throw in the
towel!  Look
at all those millions of purple fingers! Who says the
Arabians aren’t ready for democracy?
The real problem now is Iran, but
they’re not really Arabians. As Condoleezza will tell you,
they’re the ones making all the trouble in Iraq. So onward,
multicultural soldiers! Our duty is clear!
But these are the times that try
men’s souls, especially if they read the opinion polls. Despite the
“real progress” in Iraq, the summer soldiers and sunshine
patriots are now trying to get out of the weather.
Even some old hawks are
chickening out — the “to-hell-with-them hawks,” as the
grizzled veteran Richard Lowry nicely calls them. As a triple amputee who
regrets that he has but four limbs to give for his country, Lowry, editor of
National Review and author of the prophetic 2005 article
“We Are Winning!” sees all too clearly that the war on
Islamofascism can be lost only at home. And now our warriors face a new
domestic problem: the neo-chickenhawks who have lost their stomach for
paying the price for freedom.
Guys like Lowry’s (and my)
former boss, Bill Buckley, are really showing the yellow streak. Talk about
pusillanimity. Buckley and his ilk can’t even go on pecking out columns
urging our brave men and women to fight to the death. How cowardly is
that?
Happily, some of the true hawks
are showing their mettle. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican
renowned for his straight talk, still supports the war all the way. He wants to
succeed President Bush in 2008, they say, and staying the course in Iraq
— or Iran, if it comes to that — is just the ticket. The whole world
is watching, and that includes big Republican donors for whom no war in the
Middle East can ever be quite big enough.
Paul Krugman, the liberal
columnist of the New York Times, sees McCain as a phony who
has sold out to “the hard right.” As is usual with liberals,
Krugman never explains what he means by right-wing, though you
gather it’s something pretty icky. Everything liberals disapprove of is
“right-wing,” even things that are mutually exclusive.
![[Breaker quote for Battle Cries: What should we be fighting for?]](2006breakers/060314.gif) Fascist
totalitarianism is “right-wing,” but
so is its exact opposite, libertarianism. And so are monarchism, theocracy,
strict constitutionalism, military dictatorship, neoconservatism, and so on
— even, at times, Soviet Communism, though anti-Communism was
“right-wing” too. By
right-wing, liberals seem to mean everything but us. No
wonder people don’t listen to them anymore. They define their
enemies as broadly as our president defines terrorism.
Conservatives are finally realizing,
with varying degrees of clarity, that you have to define conservatism very
broadly indeed to make it cover President Bush, who is rapidly mowing down
just about everything they once hoped to conserve. Never mind the Iraq war;
look at domestic spending since 2001.
Contrary to a popular impression,
conservatism isn’t passive. It can actually be a frantic activity, like
rescuing possessions from a burning house. In this world of flux, most things
are always perishing, and you have to decide what’s worth saving.
The question now is what can still
be saved from President Bush, the political pyromaniac who decided to set
the Middle East on fire. The idea was that when everything else burned down,
only democracy would remain.
And now, better late than never,
the “to-hell-with-them hawks” are dimly sensing that there is
something just a wee bit goofy about their fearless leader. Conservatives
used to understand that democracy isn’t a synonym for
liberty. We owe our freedom much less to occasional elections than
to effective checks on power, such as habeas corpus, which can come in
handy against George W. Bush as well as Saddam Hussein.
Actually I’d feel at least a
little less uneasy about the Iraq war if it were being waged for the purpose of
giving the Arabians habeas corpus. But habeas corpus, like the
privilege against self-incrimination, is hard to fit on a bumper sticker,
and it’s pretty useless as a battle cry.
Well, it’s still
my battle cry! Shove your “democracy”! Give me
habeas corpus and a fast-talking lawyer, or give me death!
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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