Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Does It Matter?

(Reprinted from the issue of January 22, 2004)

For what it’s worth, Secretary of State Colin Powell now acknowledges he never saw a “smoking gun” proving that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or terrorist ties, but he still says it was “prudent” to assume so “at the time.” Meanwhile, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a liberal (but sober) think-tank, says the Bush administration “misrepresented” the danger from Iraq in order to precipitate war. A member of the Army War College agrees that the Iraq war was “unnecessary” for its announced purpose of fighting terrorism. And President Bush’s own former secretary of the Treasury, in a new book and related interviews, also says Bush was bent on war on Iraq from the start, long before the 9/11 attacks, even though he, O’Neill, never saw evidence of any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

O’Neill portrays Bush as a rather dull man who doesn’t listen to arguments when, or after, making up his mind on a course of action. The Bush team says O’Neill is merely bitter about having been fired, but what he says rings true. For the better part of a year, Bush has stubbornly insisted that those weapons and terrorist links would be found, but even after the capture of Saddam Hussein, they haven’t turned up.

Does anyone still believe they ever will?

As for terrorism, where is it? Are we also to believe that the extreme security measures the federal government has taken — including a powerful new Department of Homeland Security — have prevented them? There are literally millions of vulnerable “soft” targets al-Qaeda might have struck by now, if it were as powerful and determined as we have been so relentlessly told, but in this country, at least, very little has happened. The latest “high alert” of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s has passed without incident.

At what point — after all this crying “Wolf!” — may we reasonably suspect that the actual wolf peril is somewhat slight? Terrorism still bedevils the state of Israel, and Iraqi resistance goes on despite Saddam’s capture, but these are special situations. They in no way confirm the warnings of either the administration or the neoconservative war nerds.

These are boom times for the war nerds — the war on terror has brought them fame, fortune, and, not least, book contracts. Two of them, David Frum and Richard Perle, have just published a book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (Random House). The title itself tells you that they’re feeling their oats. Ending evil is a pretty ambitious agenda. Ending it even in, say, Nebraska might be a fairly tall order. But ending evil throughout the entire world, as Messrs. Frum and Perle propose to do, suggests a particularly naive sort of hubris.

Their book has received a scalding review from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who finds it “Manichean,” “cocky,” “swaggering,” “furious,” “bellicose,” “smug,” “shrill,” “triumphalist,” “bullying,” “specious,” “strident,” “sophistical,” and “self-righteous.” In the authors’ own words, “There is no middle way for Americans. It is victory or holocaust.”

Neocon watchers will suspect that neither Frum nor Perle has been able to exert much of a restraining influence on the other. They heap contempt on the State Department, Europe, the Palestinians, the United Nations, the Democrats, the foreign-policy establishment, critics of the Patriot Act, Saudi Arabia, and most other states in the Mideast (can you guess the exception?).

Though Frum was a speechwriter for Bush and helped coin the phrase “axis of evil” (his original phrase was “axis of hate” until a copy editor stepped in) and Perle also worked in the administration, the book doesn’t spare the first President Bush, who settled for driving Iraq out of Kuwait without deposing Saddam Hussein. It tells you something that even the current President Bush seems to have been unable to abide these two war nerds for very long.

The neocons may still be riding high in their own publishing strongholds, and no doubt there are still many book contracts yet to come; but one senses that they have reached their limit, as far as real influence goes. They have achieved not only publicity, but overexposure and the skepticism that goes with it. Miss Kakutani’s review is but one straw in the wind.

Conservatives still regard the incumbent Bush as “our guy,” but it’s beginning to dawn on them that, with his neocon friends, he has pretty much abandoned any principles they thought he shared with them. Like Richard Nixon, he has antagonized liberals with his style, while expanding the welfare state to appalling dimensions. If driving liberals crazy makes you a conservative, Bush is a conservative; but by any other standard, he is simply a liberal Republican.

True, he wants to be thought of as a conservative, and he wants to keep his conservative base. For them it seems to suffice that liberals find him insufferable. After all, he has waged a flag-waving war, and most conservatives like that; it doesn’t seem to occur to them that perhaps patriots might sometimes find war objectionable for their own reasons. Protesting war is a defining liberal gesture, isn’t it?
 
Without Due Reflection

Even the Pope discomfits American conservatives with his emphasis on peace. American conservatives, even devout Christians, instinctively feel that some things must be fought for, and they are repelled by what appears to them the moral softness of liberalism. This is not altogether a bad thing; in essence, it is a very good thing.

But it is fatally easy to convert their healthy instinct into an uncritical support for militarism, especially when they see liberals opposing war for the wrong reasons. It’s a subtle and difficult truth that our opponents may be accidentally right when we are accidentally wrong, and it may take a bit of humility to discern when this is the case.

Unless we do this, however, we are apt to be misled into one misconceived war after another; maybe not huge, apocalyptic wars like World War II, but smaller wars that will only make bad things worse, killing and maiming innocent people and wasting the lives of young men who imagine they are defending liberty when they are actually doing something very different.

An unjust war, however limited, necessarily entails murder; and even a just war may be fought with unjust methods. This is why our consciences should be disturbed whenever we are pressured into war — especially a “pre-emptive” war, or a “war of choice” — without due reflection on the serious moral dangers of any war. It’s particularly troubling when most Americans hardly care when it transpires that a war has resulted from false propaganda.


Is our government really “protecting” us? And how! Let me explain how the security mania is destroying liberty. Here’s a special introductory offer for new subscribers: For the rock bottom price of just $19.83, you can get a trial subscription to SOBRAN’S, my monthly newsletter. We’ll even throw in a copy of my booklet Anything Called a “Program” Is Unconstitutional: Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian and my audio tape “How Tyranny Came to America.” But hurry. This offer expires soon. Call 800-513-5053, or go to the Subscription page.

Joseph Sobran