Right you are, this is a very good read indeed.
As a conservative, I read this way I am sure most Freepers read it, as a bill of particulars against the modern American left which has behaved as something resembling a fifth column opposing if not actually sabotaging America when we wage war. This is been increasingly true since 1945.
I think is also instructive to reflect that the left in America has been less than consistent in its opposition to the nation when it wages war. In 1938 the left was clearly opposed to Hitler and the militaristic threat he represented. In 1939, after the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact, the American left pivoted in place and without a trace of shame opposed the very people it had supported against Hitler and supported the very people it had opposed. In 1940, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the left again pirouetted without a trace of chagrin and supported the Soviet Union and opposed Hitler. In these three years the American left favored war, opposed war and favored war. Pearl Harbor only brought the rest of America to the point of view the left had maintained since Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union.
This leads one to ask whether the left is congenitally against war or against waging war against fellow leftists. I conclude the latter is the case.
There is one flaw in this analysis which immediately jumps to mind: why has the left in the war against Islamicist-fascist-terrorism behaved much the same as the left behaved in the cold war waged against communism? Ralph Peters has drawn his bill of particulars with which we agree. But surely one cannot equate Islamists with communists because they have fundamentally antagonistic ideologies. One need only examine the Islamists' treatment of women, homosexuals, atheists, or those who seek freedom from religion, to confirm that. Why did the left undermine the war against terrorism?
This is a question which I wish the author had considered. My tentative conclusion is that the left sought power and regarded Islamist-fascism as a short-term opportunity if a long-term threat. In other words, if they could undermine George Bush's war against terrorism they could undermine George Bush and gain political power. If they fail to undermine George Bush's war he would get elected in 2004 and another Republican would get elected in 2008. Beyond these immediate goals the left presume from its myopic ideology that the Islamists are not really motivated by religion but by class considerations of poverty, colonialism etc. When the left assumes power they will address those issues and terrorist threats will fade away. The left assumes that religion is irrational, an emotional reaction class problems caused by capitalism. Islam will naturally become rational as those problems are dealt with by socialism.
The author touches on the mindset of the Islamist and of the American elitist intellectual but he does not go as far as I do.
What is the significance of the left's presumption that it can manage Islam after the left attains power? It means that the left thinks it can exploit terrorism now to gain power and solve the problem later. What has that got to do the way the left flip- flopped around the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact of 1939? It means that the left is very much willing to wage war when its values and its power are threatened. For confirmation one need only survey the bloody mindedness of Stalin when sacrificing millions in suicide charges against the Nazis; or Mao's murderous cultural revolution to protect his own power; or the brutality of the Khmer Rouge; or the murderous takeover of South Vietnam.
My point, we conservatives have become so habituated to regarding the left to be anti-military , anti-military-industrial complex, and so soft, and so unreliable in time of war, that we think that the left is congenitally against war. I fear that is not so.
If we apply these reflections to the present American administration we see that the left has virtually unfettered power in America and certainly over our foreign policy. With Barack Obama in power and the Congress, not to mention the media, wholly in his thrall, there is no further need to undermine the war against terrorism, indeed, the war against terrorism has become as real a threat to the left as Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.
The author mentions the threats from Russia and China. I do not think that we should equate the ideology of present-day Russia and China with the ideology that was so congenial to the American left during the Cold War. I do not want to make too broad a statement, but I do not think the thugocracy of Russia is regarded the same today by the left. China, likewise, if a threat, is a threat as much for its robust capitalism as for its statism.
Therefore, I propose that conservatives watch the reception this article receives from the left as a miner would watch his canary to determine if danger looms. When the left generally endorses the precepts of this article, watch out!
