When Liberals Are Honest About The War In Iraq

by John Hawkins | February 16, 2005 5:03 pm

Prepare yourself, folks, because you are about to read excerpts of a column from a liberal who’s being… ****Drumroll please**** honest and, yes, he confirms a few rotten things you probably always thought a lot of liberals believed, but didn’t have the guts to say out loud.

Author Kurt Anderson[1] in the New York Metro starts off (after a short intro), explaining how liberals think they’re smarter than everyone else…

“New Yorkers think we are smarter than other Americans, that the richness and difficulty of life here give our intelligence a kind of hard-won depth and nuance and sensitivity to contradictions and ambiguity. We feel we are practically French. Most New Yorkers are also liberals. And most liberals, wherever they live, believe that they are smarter than most conservatives (particularly George W. Bush).

And finally, most liberals and New Yorkers suspect that we may be too smart for our own good. It is a form of self-flattery as self-criticism. During these past few years, I have heard it said again and again that liberals’ ineffectiveness derives from their inability to see the world in the simple blacks and whites of the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Bushes. (Why else, the argument goes, did John Kerry lose?)”

Lesson #1: Liberals tend to be arrogant elitists who believe they grasp complexities and nuances that the average “murican” is simply incapble of comprehending. So you may not understand why you should give up your tax dollars to fund abortions for 15 year-old-girls and “art” that features crucifixes dipped in urine, but liberals do. Accept that they know best and vote for them.

But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

No lesson there. It’s just fun watching liberals start to realize that Bush might be right =D

“Until the Iraqi vote: surprisingly smooth and inarguably inspiring and, in some local camps, unexpectedly unsettling. Of course, for all but a nutty fringe, it is not a matter of actually wishing for an insurgent victory, but rather of hating the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team. (I may prefer the Yankees to beat the Red Sox, but I cannot bear the spectacle of Steinbrenner’s gloating.) Three months after failing to defeat Bush in our election, plenty of New Yorkers privately, half-consciously hoped for his comeuppance in Iraq’s. You know who you are. Last week, you found yourselves secretly . . . heartened—and appalled—by the stories of the Marine general who said it was “a hell of a hoot [and] fun to shoot some people” in Afghanistan, and about the possible Islamist drift of the Shiites who will now govern Iraq. When military officers show themselves to be callous warmongers, and neocon military adventurism looks untenable, certain comfortable assumptions are reaffirmed.

Like “radical chic,” a related New York specialty, “liberal guilt” once meant feeling discomfort over one’s good fortune in an unjust world. As this last U.S. election cycle began, however, a new subspecies of liberal guilt arose—over the pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration. But with Bush reelected, any shred of tacit moral rationale is gone. In other words, feel the guilt, and let it be a pang that leads to moral clarity.”

Lesson #2: Just as conservatives have been saying practically since the invasion, liberals are rooting for bad news out of Iraq. There’s a reason liberals in the MSM and in the blogosphere obsessively focus on negative news out of Iraq and put a negative spin on every spin: it’s because it makes them feel better to think things are going badly in Iraq.

Here’s more from Anderson…

“Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

I don’t mean to suggest, in the right-wing, proto-fascist rhetorical fashion, that every good American is obliged to support all American wars. But at this moment in this war, that binary choice of who you want to win is inescapable and needs to be faced squarely—just as being pro-war obliges one to admit that thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed or maimed or orphaned.

At a certain point during the Vietnam War, a majority of Americans—those of us who were in favor of unilateral U.S. withdrawal—were in a de facto alliance with the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, and the Soviets. Unpleasant but true. People say that Bush was hell-bent on invading Iraq because his father muffed it during the Gulf War in ’91. But I think a bigger motive for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Desert Storm was a longing, unconscious or not, to refight Vietnam victoriously.”

Lesson #3: Many liberals aren’t always rooting for the “home team.” At times, they would happily work against their own country if they believe it helps them politically or hurts their political foes.

If only the legions of other liberals like Kurt Anderson could be as honest as he has been…

Endnotes:
  1. Kurt Anderson: http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/columns/imperialcity/11076/index.html

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