The Left’s Black And White View Of War

12 Jan, 2005 by John Hawkins

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Liberals often accuse conservatives of “seeing things in black and white” and being unable to comprehend that everything is actually a wondrous shade of grey. That’s a fair point. Conservatives are often willing to take a stand and say “That’s right and that’s wrong” even as liberals are just starting a long diatribe about nuances & tolerance.

But, have you ever noticed that myriad of distinctions the left likes to refer to go right out the window when liberals discuss defending America? Listen to liberals talk about the military & war and you’ll often find that…

— To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, liberals seem to see little “moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest” — at least when a Republican is in office.

— Liberals often seem to be unable to tell the difference between things like sleep deprivation and let’s say chopping someone’s fingers off. To the left, it all just seems to fall under “torture.”

— Where their precious Geneva Convention is concerned, the left seems to see no difference between professional, uniformed soldiers who attempt to follow “rules of war” and terrorists who wear no uniforms, deliberately target civilians and behead captives.

— When it comes to how we treat prisoners, the left is unable to see any significant difference between small numbers of unsupervised National Guardsmen getting out of hand and few more interrogators going too far and the entire military being directly ordered by the Bush administration to torture detainees.

— The left sees no little difference in how we should legally handle American criminals who have been captured by the police and Al-Qaeda terrorists who may have been captured using sensitive intelligence data, in foreign nations, during a time of war.

— They seem unable to tell the difference between “insurgents”/terrorists deliberately murdering civilians and American soldiers accidentally killing them — that is, if they don’t just blame the Americans in both cases.

A big part of the reason that the modern left, on the whole, is so entirely ineffectual during times of war is because they are either unwilling or unable to see & understand the moral distinctions in the sort of situations I’ve described above.