Kurt Nicklas
2008-09-17 00:32:18 UTC
No We Can’t
By Bruce Thornton
City Journal | Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Party of Defeat
by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson
Spence, 224 pp.
From the days of ancient Athens, the citizens of democracies have been
querulous warriors. Key democratic institutions such as free speech
and citizen control of the military ensure that ordinary people take
an active interest in the progress of war, freely (and often loudly)
offering criticism and demanding results. Such criticism typically
expressed impatience with military and political leaders for not doing
everything they could to win wars as quickly as possible. Yet as David
Horowitz and Ben Johnson argue in their bracing analysis of American
defeatism, the antiwar movements from Vietnam to the present conflict
in Iraq represent something very different: criticism aimed at
expediting not victory, but defeat.
Once a leader of the New Left, Horowitz has become the bête noir of
the American Left through his books, speeches, and online magazine
Front Page, where Johnson is managing editor. In Party of Defeat, the
authors relentlessly expose the cant, hypocrisy, and suicidal self-
loathing of what these days passes for progressive thought, which has
corrupted the Democratic Party through its radical activist base and
compromised America’s security. The Democrats’ attack on President
Bush in the midst of a war, the authors conclude, is “the most
disgraceful episode in America’s political history.”
Party of Defeat opens with the Vietnam War-era hijacking of the
Democratic Party by antiwar radicals, whose ultimate purpose wasn’t so
much to end the war, but to discredit and weaken the political,
social, and economic foundations of America. For the radical Left,
then and now, “no longer regards itself as part of the nation,”
Horowitz and Johnson write. “This Left sees itself instead as part of
an abstract ‘humanity,’ transcending national borders and patriotic
allegiances, whose interests coincide with a worldwide radical cause.”
As such, it must work against America’s interests and success,
disguising its activity as “dissent” or a more general antiwar
sentiment.
George McGovern, who captured the Democratic Party’s presidential
nomination in 1972, embodied the leftist vision of capitalist America
as a malignant aggressor responsible for global suffering and
oppression. Though Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern
that year ratified most Americans’ rejection of the radical worldview,
the Watergate scandal empowered a Democrat-controlled Congress to
cease support for South Vietnam and to eviscerate our intelligence
agencies. Nixon’s political disgrace also made possible the election
of Jimmy Carter, who largely shared the left’s view of a dysfunctional
America. Carter, Horowitz and Johnson charge, “cut back America’s
military defenses, hamstrung America’s intelligence agencies, and
weakened the nation’s resolve.” And Carter abandoned the Shah of Iran,
whose overthrow by radical Islamists in 1979, followed by the
kidnapping of American diplomatic personnel, marked the first jihadist
challenge to America.
Carter’s ineffectual response to this attack invited more,
particularly in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Clinton, a much shrewder politician than Carter, understood that
appearing weak on national defense was political suicide after the
success of Ronald Reagan, whose strengthening of America’s military
helped bring down the Soviet Union. Yet for all of his cruise-missile
bluster, Clinton still endorsed the fundamental hostility to the
military and indifference to national defense that now seem part of
the Democrats’ political DNA.
During his tenure, “the analytical and operations branches of the CIA
were cut by 30 percent,” the authors point out. Under Clinton,
further, “the agency drastically reduced its recruitment of new case
officers . . . and closed bases, including the station in Hamburg,
where Mohammed Atta’s cell planned 9-11.” The cuts also led to a
decline of agents in key Muslim countries. And Clinton “raised the
wall between the FBI and the CIA higher than before, which fatally
obstructed the efforts to capture the 9-11 plotters,” Horowitz and
Johnson report. “As commander-in-chief [Clinton] was generally AWOL on
the battlefront with the global Islamic jihad.”
Equally disastrous was Clinton’s failure to understand the motives of
the jihadists, treating their attacks as criminal offenses rather than
as acts of war. The first World Trade Center bombing, the debacle in
Mogadishu, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the bombings of
the embassies in Africa—“Bill Clinton’s response to the four terrorist
bombings and the humiliating ambush in Somalia could be summarized as
nothing, nothing, failure, nothing, and capitulation.” Aversion to
casualties and ingrained hostility to anything other than a symbolic
use of military force kept Clinton from responding more forcefully.
Nor, despite numerous opportunities, did he authorize the killing of
Osama bin Laden, who had declared war on America, and who in numerous
writings and interviews explicitly linked America’s vulnerability to
its failure to respond to these attacks.
The Carter and Clinton presidencies show that even centrist Democrats
must appease the vocal minority of the party’s left wing, since it
provides a large number of party activists and delegates, particularly
during primaries. Hence just months after the start of the Iraq War—
and from the outset of the 2004 presidential primary campaigns—
national Democrats turned against a war that they had voted for, and
that President Clinton had laid the foundation for in 1998 with the
Iraq Liberation Act. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this
shift was the enthusiastic presence of Democratic leaders like Al
Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at the premier of
Michael Moore’s anti-American fantasy Fahrenheit 9-11 in 2004. Moore’s
film exemplified the phenomenon that came to be called “Bush
derangement syndrome,” but mainstream Democrats also played a role in
distorting the historical record concerning the Iraq War.
Party of Defeat includes a compelling reprise of the reasons why
America went to war against Saddam Hussein. UN Security Council
Resolution 1441, which declared Hussein in “material breach” of 16
previous UN resolutions enforcing the truce that ended the Gulf War,
effectively legitimized military action against Iraq once Hussein
ignored the 30-day deadline for complying with the resolution.
Moreover, President Bush’s case for removing Hussein focused on WMD
programs, not stockpiles. Though no WMD stockpiles turned up, the
report of the Iraq Survey Group, made public in October 2003, indeed
established the existence of WMD-related programs and equipment,
laboratories and safe houses concealing equipment from UN monitoring,
research on biological weapons, documents and equipment related to
uranium enrichment, plans for long-range missiles, and evidence of
attempts to acquire long-range missile technologies from North Korea.
“It was Saddam’s refusal to observe the arms-control agreements
designed to allow UN inspections and prevent him from building weapons
of mass destruction that made the war necessary,” Horowitz and Johnson
explain.
Yet these facts have been obscured by partisan attacks on the
president’s decision to invade. Never mind that the invasion was
ratified by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against
Iraq that Congress passed in October 2002, and which listed several
casus belli besides WMDs. Even before then, prominent Democrats like
Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were attacking the Bush Doctrine mandating
preemptive action against terrorist threats. The first critical
distortion that gave traction to the war’s opponents was the uproar
over minor diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had been sent to Niger to
investigate a British intelligence report finding that Hussein was
attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium. In the summer of 2003,
Wilson alleged in the New York Times and The New Republic that he had
told the administration that there was no truth to the report before
Bush repeated its findings in his 2003 State of the Union speech. As
Horowitz and Johnson note, “The charge that Bush had lied about the
Niger uranium deal provided a way for those who had previously
supported the war to find common ground with the party’s radicals who
had opposed it.”
That Wilson was a Democratic political activist and foreign-affairs
adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign raised no red flags with
a media that took his assertions on faith and relentlessly publicized
them. By the time the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had
investigated Wilson’s claims and debunked them a year later—indeed,
Wilson’s actual report “lent more credibility,” as the Senate
committee put it, to the existence of an Iraqi uranium deal—it was too
late. The “Bush lied” mantra had won media validation and provided the
antiwar activists with a potent weapon. Just how potent became clear
with the meteoric rise of Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose early
front-runner status in the 2004 presidential primaries forced
Democratic contenders like Senators John Kerry and John Edwards—both
of whom had voted in favor of removing Saddam—to tack left. Meanwhile,
an increasingly overwrought Al Gore, while sitting out the
presidential race, contradicted his long public record of advocating
regime change in Iraq.
The press played a significant role in facilitating the cycle of
sensational charges based on distorted evidence. Later investigations
repudiated many of these allegations, but could not undo the damage
done to public perceptions. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is a case in
point. “What would normally be counted as a minor incident in any
war,” Horowitz and Johnson maintain, “was elevated to a national and
then a global scandal by editors determined to exploit it without
regard for its potential impact on the national interest or the
security of American troops in Iraq.” The New York Times, which often
sets the agenda for the rest of the mainstream media, ran 60 days of
stories about Abu Ghraib, filled with ridiculous comparisons with the
My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war and with Saddam’s horrific
crimes: “It was exactly the kind of psychological-warfare campaign
that would normally have been conducted by an enemy propaganda
machine,” Horowitz and Johnson observe. So, too, with the lurid
charges of abuse of the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, many of
which were read on the Senate floor by Dick Durbin, who compared
American officials there with Nazis and the genocidal Cambodian
dictator Pol Pot. By the time 12 official investigations had debunked
such claims, the media-stoked perception that Guantanamo was some sort
of gulag of torture and abuse had achieved the status of fact, thus
providing another propaganda weapon for our enemies.
On issue after issue—the alleged number of Iraqi children killed by
sanctions, the inflated number of civilian casualties in the war, the
looted Iraqi artifacts, the celebrity of Cindy Sheehan, the media
exposure of clandestine intelligence-gathering programs, the attacks
on General David Petraeus—Horowitz and Johnson document how the truth,
and America’s security, were sacrificed to the ideology of radical
activists, the partisan needs of the Democratic Party, and the liberal
shibboleths of the mainstream media. Worse yet, America’s enemies took
up these charges and incorporated them into their own propaganda (a
frequent Al Qaeda tactic, as documented in Raymond Ibrahim’s The Al
Qaeda Reader). For example, Osama bin Laden in a fatwa quoted
epidemiologist and wannabe Democratic Congressman Les Roberts’s
ridiculous toll of 650,000 civilian dead in Iraq—a figure that is
twelve times the actual total by 2005. And the Iranian ambassador to
the United States answered charges that his country was aiding
terrorists in Iraq by alleging that “America had invaded Iraq on false
pretenses” and was now making Iran the scapegoat.
Horowitz and Johnson draw a sobering conclusion: “The decision to
attack the morality of America’s war effort has dealt a severe blow to
the American cause. It has undermined American unity in the face of
the enemy, profoundly damaged the clarity with which the war is
understood, and diminished Americans’ ability to defend themselves.”
In this important presidential election year, Party of Defeat is
essential reading.
By Bruce Thornton
City Journal | Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Party of Defeat
by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson
Spence, 224 pp.
From the days of ancient Athens, the citizens of democracies have been
querulous warriors. Key democratic institutions such as free speech
and citizen control of the military ensure that ordinary people take
an active interest in the progress of war, freely (and often loudly)
offering criticism and demanding results. Such criticism typically
expressed impatience with military and political leaders for not doing
everything they could to win wars as quickly as possible. Yet as David
Horowitz and Ben Johnson argue in their bracing analysis of American
defeatism, the antiwar movements from Vietnam to the present conflict
in Iraq represent something very different: criticism aimed at
expediting not victory, but defeat.
Once a leader of the New Left, Horowitz has become the bête noir of
the American Left through his books, speeches, and online magazine
Front Page, where Johnson is managing editor. In Party of Defeat, the
authors relentlessly expose the cant, hypocrisy, and suicidal self-
loathing of what these days passes for progressive thought, which has
corrupted the Democratic Party through its radical activist base and
compromised America’s security. The Democrats’ attack on President
Bush in the midst of a war, the authors conclude, is “the most
disgraceful episode in America’s political history.”
Party of Defeat opens with the Vietnam War-era hijacking of the
Democratic Party by antiwar radicals, whose ultimate purpose wasn’t so
much to end the war, but to discredit and weaken the political,
social, and economic foundations of America. For the radical Left,
then and now, “no longer regards itself as part of the nation,”
Horowitz and Johnson write. “This Left sees itself instead as part of
an abstract ‘humanity,’ transcending national borders and patriotic
allegiances, whose interests coincide with a worldwide radical cause.”
As such, it must work against America’s interests and success,
disguising its activity as “dissent” or a more general antiwar
sentiment.
George McGovern, who captured the Democratic Party’s presidential
nomination in 1972, embodied the leftist vision of capitalist America
as a malignant aggressor responsible for global suffering and
oppression. Though Richard Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern
that year ratified most Americans’ rejection of the radical worldview,
the Watergate scandal empowered a Democrat-controlled Congress to
cease support for South Vietnam and to eviscerate our intelligence
agencies. Nixon’s political disgrace also made possible the election
of Jimmy Carter, who largely shared the left’s view of a dysfunctional
America. Carter, Horowitz and Johnson charge, “cut back America’s
military defenses, hamstrung America’s intelligence agencies, and
weakened the nation’s resolve.” And Carter abandoned the Shah of Iran,
whose overthrow by radical Islamists in 1979, followed by the
kidnapping of American diplomatic personnel, marked the first jihadist
challenge to America.
Carter’s ineffectual response to this attack invited more,
particularly in the 1990s during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
Clinton, a much shrewder politician than Carter, understood that
appearing weak on national defense was political suicide after the
success of Ronald Reagan, whose strengthening of America’s military
helped bring down the Soviet Union. Yet for all of his cruise-missile
bluster, Clinton still endorsed the fundamental hostility to the
military and indifference to national defense that now seem part of
the Democrats’ political DNA.
During his tenure, “the analytical and operations branches of the CIA
were cut by 30 percent,” the authors point out. Under Clinton,
further, “the agency drastically reduced its recruitment of new case
officers . . . and closed bases, including the station in Hamburg,
where Mohammed Atta’s cell planned 9-11.” The cuts also led to a
decline of agents in key Muslim countries. And Clinton “raised the
wall between the FBI and the CIA higher than before, which fatally
obstructed the efforts to capture the 9-11 plotters,” Horowitz and
Johnson report. “As commander-in-chief [Clinton] was generally AWOL on
the battlefront with the global Islamic jihad.”
Equally disastrous was Clinton’s failure to understand the motives of
the jihadists, treating their attacks as criminal offenses rather than
as acts of war. The first World Trade Center bombing, the debacle in
Mogadishu, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the bombings of
the embassies in Africa—“Bill Clinton’s response to the four terrorist
bombings and the humiliating ambush in Somalia could be summarized as
nothing, nothing, failure, nothing, and capitulation.” Aversion to
casualties and ingrained hostility to anything other than a symbolic
use of military force kept Clinton from responding more forcefully.
Nor, despite numerous opportunities, did he authorize the killing of
Osama bin Laden, who had declared war on America, and who in numerous
writings and interviews explicitly linked America’s vulnerability to
its failure to respond to these attacks.
The Carter and Clinton presidencies show that even centrist Democrats
must appease the vocal minority of the party’s left wing, since it
provides a large number of party activists and delegates, particularly
during primaries. Hence just months after the start of the Iraq War—
and from the outset of the 2004 presidential primary campaigns—
national Democrats turned against a war that they had voted for, and
that President Clinton had laid the foundation for in 1998 with the
Iraq Liberation Act. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this
shift was the enthusiastic presence of Democratic leaders like Al
Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle at the premier of
Michael Moore’s anti-American fantasy Fahrenheit 9-11 in 2004. Moore’s
film exemplified the phenomenon that came to be called “Bush
derangement syndrome,” but mainstream Democrats also played a role in
distorting the historical record concerning the Iraq War.
Party of Defeat includes a compelling reprise of the reasons why
America went to war against Saddam Hussein. UN Security Council
Resolution 1441, which declared Hussein in “material breach” of 16
previous UN resolutions enforcing the truce that ended the Gulf War,
effectively legitimized military action against Iraq once Hussein
ignored the 30-day deadline for complying with the resolution.
Moreover, President Bush’s case for removing Hussein focused on WMD
programs, not stockpiles. Though no WMD stockpiles turned up, the
report of the Iraq Survey Group, made public in October 2003, indeed
established the existence of WMD-related programs and equipment,
laboratories and safe houses concealing equipment from UN monitoring,
research on biological weapons, documents and equipment related to
uranium enrichment, plans for long-range missiles, and evidence of
attempts to acquire long-range missile technologies from North Korea.
“It was Saddam’s refusal to observe the arms-control agreements
designed to allow UN inspections and prevent him from building weapons
of mass destruction that made the war necessary,” Horowitz and Johnson
explain.
Yet these facts have been obscured by partisan attacks on the
president’s decision to invade. Never mind that the invasion was
ratified by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against
Iraq that Congress passed in October 2002, and which listed several
casus belli besides WMDs. Even before then, prominent Democrats like
Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were attacking the Bush Doctrine mandating
preemptive action against terrorist threats. The first critical
distortion that gave traction to the war’s opponents was the uproar
over minor diplomat Joseph Wilson, who had been sent to Niger to
investigate a British intelligence report finding that Hussein was
attempting to purchase yellowcake uranium. In the summer of 2003,
Wilson alleged in the New York Times and The New Republic that he had
told the administration that there was no truth to the report before
Bush repeated its findings in his 2003 State of the Union speech. As
Horowitz and Johnson note, “The charge that Bush had lied about the
Niger uranium deal provided a way for those who had previously
supported the war to find common ground with the party’s radicals who
had opposed it.”
That Wilson was a Democratic political activist and foreign-affairs
adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign raised no red flags with
a media that took his assertions on faith and relentlessly publicized
them. By the time the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had
investigated Wilson’s claims and debunked them a year later—indeed,
Wilson’s actual report “lent more credibility,” as the Senate
committee put it, to the existence of an Iraqi uranium deal—it was too
late. The “Bush lied” mantra had won media validation and provided the
antiwar activists with a potent weapon. Just how potent became clear
with the meteoric rise of Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose early
front-runner status in the 2004 presidential primaries forced
Democratic contenders like Senators John Kerry and John Edwards—both
of whom had voted in favor of removing Saddam—to tack left. Meanwhile,
an increasingly overwrought Al Gore, while sitting out the
presidential race, contradicted his long public record of advocating
regime change in Iraq.
The press played a significant role in facilitating the cycle of
sensational charges based on distorted evidence. Later investigations
repudiated many of these allegations, but could not undo the damage
done to public perceptions. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal is a case in
point. “What would normally be counted as a minor incident in any
war,” Horowitz and Johnson maintain, “was elevated to a national and
then a global scandal by editors determined to exploit it without
regard for its potential impact on the national interest or the
security of American troops in Iraq.” The New York Times, which often
sets the agenda for the rest of the mainstream media, ran 60 days of
stories about Abu Ghraib, filled with ridiculous comparisons with the
My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war and with Saddam’s horrific
crimes: “It was exactly the kind of psychological-warfare campaign
that would normally have been conducted by an enemy propaganda
machine,” Horowitz and Johnson observe. So, too, with the lurid
charges of abuse of the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, many of
which were read on the Senate floor by Dick Durbin, who compared
American officials there with Nazis and the genocidal Cambodian
dictator Pol Pot. By the time 12 official investigations had debunked
such claims, the media-stoked perception that Guantanamo was some sort
of gulag of torture and abuse had achieved the status of fact, thus
providing another propaganda weapon for our enemies.
On issue after issue—the alleged number of Iraqi children killed by
sanctions, the inflated number of civilian casualties in the war, the
looted Iraqi artifacts, the celebrity of Cindy Sheehan, the media
exposure of clandestine intelligence-gathering programs, the attacks
on General David Petraeus—Horowitz and Johnson document how the truth,
and America’s security, were sacrificed to the ideology of radical
activists, the partisan needs of the Democratic Party, and the liberal
shibboleths of the mainstream media. Worse yet, America’s enemies took
up these charges and incorporated them into their own propaganda (a
frequent Al Qaeda tactic, as documented in Raymond Ibrahim’s The Al
Qaeda Reader). For example, Osama bin Laden in a fatwa quoted
epidemiologist and wannabe Democratic Congressman Les Roberts’s
ridiculous toll of 650,000 civilian dead in Iraq—a figure that is
twelve times the actual total by 2005. And the Iranian ambassador to
the United States answered charges that his country was aiding
terrorists in Iraq by alleging that “America had invaded Iraq on false
pretenses” and was now making Iran the scapegoat.
Horowitz and Johnson draw a sobering conclusion: “The decision to
attack the morality of America’s war effort has dealt a severe blow to
the American cause. It has undermined American unity in the face of
the enemy, profoundly damaged the clarity with which the war is
understood, and diminished Americans’ ability to defend themselves.”
In this important presidential election year, Party of Defeat is
essential reading.