THE WANDERER, FEBRUARY 8, 2007
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Irony Overload
Senate Democrats can't muster the will to do what
they would really like to do: pass a resolution calling
for a full withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. And
most Republicans who would like such a withdrawal are
inhibited by party loyalty from openly opposing their
president.
President Bush and his dwindling band of allies are
relying on the argument that a call for withdrawal would
"hurt the morale of our troops" and simultaneously
"encourage the enemy." But this is putting the cart
before the horse. The chief question is whether the war
is warranted by American national interests and morally
right; if not, the morale of our troops is a secondary
question. The war isn't being waged for the sake of the
men fighting it, after all. The problem is not that their
morale is low, but that too many of them are being
sacrificed for no clear purpose.
The war has become a hot potato that Bush can't let
go of. The "war on terrorism" has morphed madly into a
war between rival groups of terrorists, "liberated" from
Saddam Hussein but indisposed to enjoy the blessings of
democracy we have tried to bestow on them.
Nor has democracy swept the Middle East as Bush
assured us it would after "regime change." Instead, Sunni
and Shi'ite Iraqis, who appear to hate each other even
worse than they hate Americans, are murdering each other
by taking electric drills to each other's skulls. Who is
profiting most from this war -- Halliburton or Home
Depot?
As for encouraging the enemy, the enemy presumably
knows from the polls and election results that the
American public has decided that the whole war has been a
disaster. It's a little late for a rousing chorus of
"Over There." We have waged too many wars "over there."
The excuse is always that we might otherwise have to
fight them "over here," as if hordes of camel-riding
terrorists were poised to invade if we display weakness.
But common sense is finally setting in, and
Americans are starting to realize how dearly we have paid
for the delusion that we are always facing foreign
threats.
Even the once-hawkish weekly THE NEW REPUBLIC has
run an editorial lamenting our "overreaction" to the 9/11
attacks. That's something even Democratic politicians are
still afraid to admit, but it's overdue. In the
still-hawkish WALL STREET JOURNAL, my old friend Peggy
Noonan, a loyal Republican but a sensitive observer, has
expressed her dismay at Bush's insensate stubbornness and
praised Sen. Chuck Hagel for his blunt skepticism about
this war. (I wonder how long the JOURNAL will keep
putting up with Peggy's Irish Catholic wisdom.)
In public controversies of this sort, I like to
apply a simple test: After time has passed and both sides
have had their say, which way are the conversions and
defections going? Countless people who once supported the
Iraq war have changed their minds about it; even many
neoconservatives have repudiated it. But it would be hard
to find a single person who originally opposed it but has
come to believe either that it is justified or that it is
winnable. The evidence is in.
Bush and Vice President Cheney are responsible for
many of the conversions. Their incessant dire warnings,
optimistic predictions, and appeals to patriotism worked
for a while to rally public opinion, but the facts have
contradicted them too many times. The country is
suffering from severe irony overload. Cheney's
intransigence and surliness would have made him a severe
liability even without such grimly comic mishaps as his
hunting accident and his lesbian daughter's pregnancy.
The marvel is that these two men still expect to be
taken seriously. And they continue to hope for a wider
war with Iran. Somewhere, Colin Powell must be mopping
his brow. It must be a huge relief that the duty of
trying to defend this administration has fallen to
Condoleezza Rice instead of him.
Bush has lost the allegiance of conservatives and
even many of his former neocon defenders. One of the most
startling and devastating attacks on him was written by
Bruce Fein of THE WASHINGTON TIMES, which all but
questioned his sanity for pushing "a utopian agenda to
free the planet of tyranny and violence." The whole
planet!
Don't Ask Me!
Speaking of Dick Cheney, it is with great regret
that I must confess that I have given up trying to
understand, let alone explain, what the perjury trial of
his former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is all
about. It would be easier to sum up the Watergate case in
a single paragraph.
Washington is full of people who have followed every
turn of the story and feel quite passionately about it.
I, alas, am not among them, nor is anyone I have talked
to, though I dimly recognize the names of the cast of
characters: Libby himself, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald,
former ambassador Joseph Wilson, his wife Valerie Plame
(illegally outed as a minor CIA agent), Richard Armitage,
and of course columnist Robert Novak. And Ari Fleischer
has now testified. Something about a leak, I believe.
Scooter feels he has been set up to take the rap,
whatever it is. Apparently it's peripherally related to
the Iraq war. Cheney seems to have had it in for Wilson,
who had written a piece embarrassing to the Bush
administration in THE NEW YORK TIMES: He said he had been
unable to find the desired proof that Iraq had gotten
uranium from Niger for the nuclear weapons it was
supposedly trying to make.
Cheney isn't being charged with any crime, but the
key to this story, buried under the confusing details, is
evidently his desire to punish Wilson for casting doubt
on the administration's rationale for war. Maybe it
hardly matters at this point, except as an additional
revelation of character, of the constantly conspiratorial
nature of Washington, and of Cheney's heavy-handed
scheming.
A Quieter Sort of Holocaust
Hardly a day passes without denunciations of
"Holocaust denial," especially now that the government of
Iran is sponsoring it. In the secular West, it remains
the supreme thought-crime.
As long as the Holocaust meant simply the Nazi
persecution of Jews, there wasn't much controversy about
it.
But unfortunately, it has come to mean much more
than that; it has become inseparable from Middle Eastern
politics, as a justification for the state of Israel, for
its oppression of Palestinian Arabs, and so forth; and it
is also used to defame Christianity and particularly the
Catholic Church. Such Jewish writers as Hyam Maccoby and
Daniel Goldhagen have blamed the Holocaust and indeed all
anti-Semitism on the Church. We are witnessing what might
be called "Holocaust inflation."
Meanwhile, we are also witnessing -- though without
noticing -- a quieter sort of holocaust: the gradual
depopulation of the West and Japan though contraception
and abortion. This has been promoted by both governments
and the media, which also promote the sexual immorality
and perversion that make it possible. We are being subtly
taught to exterminate ourselves.
The whole process is more insidious than war, but in
the end, even more destructive.
+ + +
"What James Burnham called 'the suicide of the West'
is now far advanced in a way Burnham couldn't have
imagined." Regime Change Begins at Home -- a new
selection of my Confessions of a Reactionary Utopian --
will brighten your odd moments, and it comes with all new
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--- Joseph Sobran
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