PUBLIC NUISANCES: Rumsfeld Speaks, Democrats Screech/Their Sound and Their Fury
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
PUBLIC NUISANCES R. Emmett T y r r e | l , . ! r . Rumsfeld Speaks, Democrats Screech WASHINGTON l ~ ECENTLY IN A SPEECH before the national convention of the American Legion, Secretary of...
...He defended our present policy in I raq and our war on terror by citing historic events and quotingWinston Churchill and Georges Clemenceau...
...Our opponents in Iraq and among the terrorists are nihilists, everybit as dangerous as the Nazis...
...He offers the liberals' "instinct for pacifism," their moral relativism, their weakness for appeasement, and their confusion of Islamism with opposition to materialism and to the corporate world...
...Rumsfeld asserts that the appeasers suffered from "a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion," concluding with a paraphrase of Churchill's great line that the appeaser seems to believe that if he feeds the alligator enough, "the alligator will eat him last...
...Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused Rumsfeld of questioning the critics' patriotism...
...How do we explain it...
...In the months after our victory in Iraq, they recognized that as long as they stuck by our wartime president they would be in the minority...
...It is disturbance of the peace...
...He seems to be in extremis much of the time...
...Where I accuse them of being smug and opportunistic, he accuses them of being smug and guilty of adhering to moral equivalence...
...In the years prior to World War II, Rumsfeld argues, "a sentiment took root that contended that if only the growing threats that had begun to emerge in Europe and Asia could be appeased [world war] might be avoided...
...He gave rewards to suicide bombers, and harbored terrorists on his soil, for instance the late Abu Nidal, the mastermind of terrorist attacks in over 20 countries, includingthe hijacking of the Achille Lauro...
...A few decades back the war in Vietnam got to them too, but in the war's early years it was a minority of Democrats who opposed the war...
...I have to admit that when we invaded Irac~ and so many Democrats were hailing the invasion as a blow for freedom, I, in my youthful idealism, thought this would be one war they would not abscond from...
...Presumably, we could prevent these unseemly eruptions if the Republicans would clear their speeches with Dr...
...Borah was a Republican isolationist, so perhaps we can understand the aforementioned Democrats' indignation...
...Then what had been a small antiwar movement composed mainly of cranks such as Noam Chomsky began to gather up liberal Democrats until it now comprises much of the Democratic leadership...
...See "Saddam's Delusions" in the May/June 2006 Foreign Affairs...
...The historical record is a particularly sore subject with the likes of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who inveighed against Rumsfeld's speech as "reckless...
...Nancy Pelosi, spoke of the Secretary's impairment.., and she was not referring to his golf swing...
...This cannot be good for their health.Acouple weeks back the source of their anger was the administration's repeated references to the 1930s, which is apparently a very sore spot with them...
...Some see this as anti-Americanism...
...The war in Iraq has obviously gotten to the Democrats...
...On that both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush seemed to agree until the 2004 presidential elections drew nigh...
...Both have been smug, but today's are smug and opportunistic...
...That value is a misdemeanor in the criminal codes of most civilized countries...
...History has not been going his way for a while...
...I suggest the one who chews bubble gum...
...The only individuals Rumsfeld criticizes are a handful of journalists and whoever in Amnesty International called Gitmo "the gulag of our times...
...But they are also ignoramuses...
...Now they are again indignados, owing to our suave President's mention of Iraq during a speech commemorating the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks...
...The liberals are uncomfortable being on the side of bourgeois conventionality...
...Rumsfeld is...
...These are very touchy pols...
...Drop a liberal into a community where conventions have been established and where civility reigns and our liberal friend will find some triviality to protest...
...He had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people and for the purposes of genocide...
...edged that in this war there have been "mistakes and setbacks and casualties,' But he put them in perspective, quoting Clemenceau's observation that war is a "series of catastrophes that results in victory" Citing history and quoting lines like that can only bring the Democrats to a boil...
...He labored to dupe leaders in the Arab world and his generals into thinking he had them...
...It stems from the liberals' only unwavering political value, the political value that now stands alone at the heart of liberalism...
...He defied United Nations resolutions to search for them and was usually ambiguous as to whether he had them...
...Today's appeasers misrepresent the Bush foreign policy for their own political advancement...
...But Rumsfeld never in his entire speech mentioned "political enemies...
...Today there is no one plausible to negotiate with in Iraq or in Afghanistan, and there is nothing even meretriciously attractive to negotiate about-though Nancy Pelosi adorned in a burkha has its appeal, as does fat Senator Teddy Kennedy denied his firewater...
...NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 79...
...PUBLIC NUISANCES R. Emmett T y r r e | l , . ! r . Rumsfeld Speaks, Democrats Screech WASHINGTON l ~ ECENTLY IN A SPEECH before the national convention of the American Legion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made an unconscionable faux pas...
...Of course, if the volcanic doctor had to vet all of them he might suffer some sort of seizure, though howwould anyone know...
...Only after the hellish Richard Nixon became president did defeatism spread more widely among what had once been called Cold War liberals...
...Then they noticed whose side they were on...
...As I say, they are exceptionally touchy...
...Theirs is the party ofbumper stickers...
...But I have an additional explanation...
...Yet at least in the Vietnam War the antiwar liberals could point to a plausible exit strategy, to wit, negotiations...
...The entire speech is cast on a very high level...
...Perhaps if the antiwar Democrats take the White House in 2008 Dr...
...They have also been the first to bug out of Iraq, which one would think does not put liberals in a good light...
...Actually it is something more amusing...
...Leader Reid went on to elaborate that the administration that Rumsfeld serves "is more interested in lashing out at its political enemies than it is in winning the war on terror and in bringing an end to the war in Iraq...
...We're morally and socially no better than Iran...
...Our liberal friends are congenitally alienated...
...Their Sound and Their Fury WASHINGTON O UR LIBERAL FRIENDS ARE INA FURY of indignation once again...
...In a thoughtful and timely Wall Street Journal column, Bret Stephens offers this: "Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains-namely liberals-are typically the most reluctant to fight...
...Otherwise he sticks to a theme that is unassailable...
...Thus for a few months, perhaps even a year, they opposed the Islamofascists and favored bringing down Saddam...
...How closely Saddam was linked to the Islamofascists is a matter for historians to thrash out...
...Saddam was a contemporary Hitler...
...In the 1930s the appeasers were in power, and as Rumsfeld notes they could ridicule and ignore Churchill and his allies...
...Howard Dean...
...Well, the Democrats who responded so hysterically to Rumsfeld's speech are not very civilized...
...Chomsky will be their secretary of defense, and they can choose as secretary of state one of the Dixie Chicks...
...The North Vietnamese Communists had the sense to present themselves as ready to negotiate and with a dulcet offer to the Americans, "peace and freedom and democracy in a united Vietnam"-ha, ha, ha...
...Do the likes of Reid and Pelosi think we are no better than the Iranian Islamofascists who whoop it up for suicide bombers and are governed bya zanywho looks like an eternal graduate student from one of our cow colleges...
...Today the appeasers are out of power so they ridicule and misrepresent those who are directing our war against what Rumsfeld calls "a new type of fascism...
...It is dispassionate, erudite, and difficult to refute...
...Is the thing possible...
...My colleague at TbeAmerican Spectator Jed Babbin considers my assessment of today's appeasers in the Democratic Party too mild...
...Stephens advances several reasons, none of which diminishes the irony of his point...
...In his speech he acknowl78 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Reid's equivalent in the House of Representatives, the Hon...
...Sozzled in multiculturalism they see America, says Babbin, "as no better than any other country regardless of its nature...
...Yuk, and so they oppose this war, while offering no alternative-unless it be Pelosi in a burkha and rotund Teddy on the wagon...
...I would argue that there is a difference between the appeasers of the 1930s and today's...
...That is a rude way to discuss policy with one's Democratic opponents...
...Thus one by one they deserted the war they had approved and sided with the war's early opponents, starry-eyed radicals such as Professor Noam Chomsky...
...but he certainly abetted their mischief, and for years prior to the arrival of our troops at his gaudy palaces both he and the terrorists were enemies of our country and our Western values...
...As James Taranto noted in his indispensable Best of the Web column, the only American politician Rumsfeld mentioned was the late Senator William Borah who upon hearing of Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland sighed: "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
