Norman Poheretz, in a lengthy new article in Commentary magazine, again brings us back to earth thoroughly rebutting all of the various memes floating through the anti-Iraq debate. He argues, that the opponents of the war are still fighting the Viet Nam battle, knowing that the world view on war, and on this war in particular could take them out of the game. The article is stunning in its detail and commentary on various war critics. It deserves a careful read. Podheretz starts out by setting forth a framework from the Revolutionary War that doesn't seem all that dissimilar to our current situation.
"Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this
country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in
Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something
that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American
Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, “the
times that try men’s souls,” the times in which “the summer soldier and
the sunshine patriot” become so disheartened that they “shrink from the
service of [their] country.”
But
Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the
American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things
had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or
hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:
’Tis
surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a
country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . .
[T]heir peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of
sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might
otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.
Thus,
he explained, “Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head,”
emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition
to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to
conceal."
Podheretz then addresses the current situation. He applies special attention to Zbignew Brzezinksi "Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush
should be accused of “suicidal statecraft” by, of all people, the man
who in the late 1970’s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened
the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the
Oval Office stood impotently by for over a year before finally
authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our
national humiliation." It goes on in scathing detail about other aspects of Brzezinski's career with President Carter as well as various other aspects of Brzezinski's commentary.
Podheretz discusses the absorption of Brzezinski and experts on the other side of the political fence such as Brent Scowcroft with the Israeli-Palestinian battle, considering all other aspects of the Middle East as just distractions. This is not true, as he points out, and cannot be true if one is going to address the instability in the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply symptomatic of the broader issues in the region.
At the end of the article, Podheretz returns to the Revolutionary War, where he began his discussion.
"Tom Paine grew so disgusted with “the mean principles
that are held by the Tories,” with the hypocrisy of the disguised
Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and
the sunshine patriots of 1776-7 that he finally gave up trying to
persuade them:
I
have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used
numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to
sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.
And
so, “quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of
the evil that threatens them,” Paine turned “to those who have nobly
stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out,” and rested his
hopes on them.
These
hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And
neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see “the full
extent of the evil that threatens” us; who understand the necessity of
the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the
moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has
chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what
the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than
200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of
time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part."
Read the whole article, and you won't wonder why news such as this or this isn't showing up in the mainstream media and generating support for this effort to completely change the nature of the Middle East. And, I wonder if we could even be having this discussion without the "free market" of information that flows over the internet.
