Fisking Harley Sorenson On Foreign Policy

14 Dec, 2004 by John Hawkins

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If you want to understand why Americans don’t trust liberals with foreign policy, this column by Harley Sorensen from the San Francisco Chronicle will give you a pretty good idea. Not every liberal agrees with the sort of tripe you’re about to read, but far too many of them do.

Let’s read what Sorenson has to say, shall we?

“Like egomaniacal rulers forever, dating back to the cave, Mr. Bush demonized the people he wanted to kill. (Iraq has) “weapons of mass destruction,” he asserted. Yeah, like we don’t. Like India doesn’t. Like Israel doesn’t. Like Pakistan doesn’t. Like China doesn’t. Like Russia doesn’t. Why don’t we invade them? Or ourselves?”

The implication here is that it doesn’t matter which countries hold WMDs and which ones don’t. Whether it’s Israel or Iraq, India or Iran, North Korea or Britain, what’s the difference? Why doesn’t Sorenson know that already? Why does he look at a friendly democracy like Israel that’s allied with us and a nation like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that was hostile to us and not understand why we’d be concerned about one having WMD’s and not the other? Would it make things clearer for Sorenson if he considered whether it mattered who got nukes first, the US or Nazi Germany?

In and of itself, this paragraph shows that Sorenson doesn’t even have a childlike understanding of foreign policy. After all, even a small child can figure out that he should be more leery of people who want to hurt him than people who don’t.

Here’s more from Sorenson…

“It turned out the Iraqis didn’t have those terrible weapons. But, the Iraqis are evil, Mr. Bush asserted. Well, at least their leader was, so, by extension, they all were. And, by gosh and by golly, they might have harbored terrorists at one time or another.

Quickly now, name a country that harbored the Sept. 11 terrorists! Ah, that was too easy. You got it right away. The answer: the United States of America. That’s who sheltered the 19 terrorists before their attacks on Manhattan and Washington. That’s where those terrorists worked and played, ate and slept, plotted and rehearsed right up to that tragic day. The U.S. of A.”

Setting aside Sorenson’s deliberately misleading claim that Bush asserted that all “Iraqis are evil,” we’re again back to a subject a child could understand, but a liberal writing for a major newspaper doesn’t. Sorenson is unable to distinguish between a country like the US, which had terrorists furtively sneaking around on its soil and a nation like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which deliberately sheltered, trained, funded, and protected terrorist groups. This sort of moral blindness, which sadly is quite common among liberals, makes it impossible for them to tell friend from foe on the foreign policy front.

Next up for Sorenson, it’s Nazi time…

“But not all young people are eager to die for Mr. Bush. Military recruiters are having difficulty finding enough cannon fodder to fill their quotas. More significantly, men and women already in uniform are rebelling. They’re refusing to fight for Mr. Bush and his secret ambitions. They’re deserting by the thousands. According to “60 Minutes” last week (quoting the Pentagon), more than 5,500 servicemen have deserted since the beginning of Mr. Bush’s war.

Aware of that thinking, at least 5,500 of our troops have decided to desert rather than take part in senseless killing.”

So Sorenson sees our troops in Iraq, who are helping to bring Democracy to that country, as the equivalent of Nazi war criminals. So does that make the terrorists who are sponsoring suicide bombings and beheading civilians the good guys?

Moreover, isn’t it fair to say that Sorenson and indeed a lot of liberals who think like him don’t support the troops? I mean, if you believe our troops are nazi-like soldiers with a “caveman mentality” and that deserters should be praised, why would you support the troops? Obviously a lot of people on the left, like Sorenson, detest the troops. They just learned after Vietnam that being that honest about that issue led to political death and since then they’ve had to pretend to support the troops out of political necessity.

Here’s more from Sorenson on the deserters…

“Now, if you’ve been overly influenced by Mr. Bush’s clever propaganda, you might declare these deserters “traitors.” But if you haven’t been taken in by the Bush machine, you might call them heroes in the finest tradition of the United States. They are putting their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor at stake to serve the cause of Right rather than the ambitions of the current president.”

The deserters are “heroes in the finest tradition of the United States”? At certain points, the left’s hostility to the military and their own country can make their remarks practically indistinguishable from those of our enemies. This is one of those times.

Last but not least,

Perhaps, in our barely civilized world, someone should inform Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of this travesty. He thinks our troops should learn to cope with less than the best equipment. But he seems to think differently on the subject of manpower. Perhaps someone should tell him, that, when the president orders up an illegal war, “You go to [that] war with the army you have, not the army you might want.”

You’d think that the sort of lefties who ramble on incessantly about nuance and shades of grey would understand that there’s no such thing as perfection when it comes to the military. You do indeed go to war “with the army you have, not the army you might want” because you will NEVER HAVE everything that you want. You can’t afford everything that you want for the military, things take time to prepare, and you can’t possibly anticipate every situation.

Besides, what does Sorenson care if a bunch of guys he was painting as the equivalent of Nazis earlier in the column doesn’t have the best equipment? That just makes it easier for the “good guys” to kill them right? And aren’t liberals always the ones who want to slash funding for the military in order to spend it on all varieties of utopian projects and largesse for their constituency groups?

I’ll tell you why Sorenson brings this up: because most liberals don’t truly understand foreign policy or care very much about it and therefore they generally only use it as a way to bash 1) Bush 2) Republicans or 3) America in general.

In summary, people with this mentality don’t belong in the White House, especially when we’re prosecuting the war on terrorism. That’s why we should be thrilled that we don’t have to worry about John Kerry and all the Harley Sorenson style liberals that he would have brought with him into the White House if he had won…