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Finally, with the Kerry defeat we should lay to rest the Left's latest revisionism that was much in vogue during the last few months in the mainstream media -- promulgated by journalists and pundits in places like Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. We were lectured ad nauseam that the terrorists did not -- as did extremists of all ages such as the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarians -- hate us for our allegiance to consensual government, modernism, and the freedom of the individual, but rather had understandable grievances because of our support for Israel, the war in Iraq, or the presence of oil companies in the Middle East. That canard too was rejected by the voters. Bin Laden's allegiance to fundamentalist fascism and hatred of the West may stay constant, but it is ignored by our intelligentsia, who instead gives credence to al Qaeda's various grumbles that have ranged from the U.N. embargo of Iraq to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to, most recently, the supposed toppling of high-rise buildings in Lebanon. That there is now no embargo of Iraq, but U.S. aid; that there are no troops in Saudi, but increasing U.S. criticism of the monarchy; that Americans were butchered in Beirut and did not really retaliate but instead saved Arafat from his doom -- all that apparently does not register with Bush's critics. In contrast, the majority of Americans insists with the president that the Islamic fascists have no more gripe against America than did a Tojo, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Khomeini -- and that such nightmarish figures, not our values and policies, must and will pass away. The revisionists kept repeating in this campaign that Afghanistan was lost to the warlords due to "taking the eye off the ball in Iraq" and "outsourcing" the fighting and thus losing bin Laden. George Bush ignored these second-guessing experts, assured the American people that, like our forefathers who won WWII, a much richer America could still fight and win two conflicts at once, and that bin Laden, in the manner of a Karadzic or Mladic, was a doomed man -- his end a detail of when, not if. The harpies shrieked that Saddam's petrofueled barbarity was not connected with al Qaeda or even the larger wave of Islamic terrorism -- as if, say, Aryan Nazis could not have had anti-democratic alliances of convenience with Asian imperialists in Japan; as if the first World Trade Center bombing, the North Africa killings, the career of Zarqawi, and the al Qaedists in Kurdistan were either nonexistent or irrelevant. In response, George Bush maintained that Islamic fascism is global, fed by self-induced failures of Middle East autocrats, who hand-in-glove with terrorists diverted the frustration of the Arab Street against America -- a hyperpower that is not, pace bin Laden, libertine Sweden but rather their worst nightmare. Autocracy is their illness, and democracy, not American apologies, is their cure. The administration maintained, without wavering, that those who were blowing up Americans in Kabul, or Baghdad, or Westerners in Madrid and Bali were of the same ilk. Their differences were the stuff of legalistic nit-pickers who might have equally parsed Mussolini's fascism from Hitler's Nazism or claimed that Mao's Marxism so differed from Stalin's Communism that the two could never have teamed up in Korea with yet a third wild-card totalitarian. George Bush -- through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated "scandals" -- has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military. Most of the American people, of course, agreed all along. Victor Davis Hanson |
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