Anti-Climacus

"WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO WE HAVE?": The always amusing Dan Savage (of "Savage Love" fame) rips Leftists a new one on Iraq and places himself firmly in the 'decent left' category.

Me likey:

"These developments--a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq--are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy. They also represent an enormous moral victory for the American left, which has long argued that our support for "friendly" dictators around the world was immoral. (Saddam used to be one of those "friendly" dictators.) After 9/11, the left argued that our support for brutal dictatorships in the Middle East helped create anti-American hatred. Apparently the Bush administration now agrees--so why isn't the American left claiming this victory?

Because claiming this victory means backing this war, and the American left refuses to back this or any war--which makes the left completely irrelevant in any conversation about the advisability or necessity of a particular war. (Pacifism is faith, not politics*.) What's worse, the left argues that our past support for regimes like Saddam's prevents us from doing anything about Saddam now. We supported (and in some cases installed) tyrants, who in turn created despair, which in turn created terrorists, who came over here and blew shit up... so now what do we do? According to the left, we do nothing. It's all our fault, so we're just going to have to sit back and wait for New York City or D.C. or a big port city (like, say, Seattle or Portland) to disappear."

"But wait! Taking out Saddam means dropping bombs, and dropping bombs only creates more terrorists!

That's the lefty argument du jour, and a lot of squish-brains are falling for it, but it's not an argument that the historical record supports. The United States dropped a hell of a lot of bombs on Serbia, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Germany, Japan, and Italy. If dropping bombs creates terrorists, where are all the German terrorists? Or the Italian terrorists? Or the Vietnamese terrorists?"

*Reinhold Niebuhr produced the definitive essay on the relation between faith and pacifism during WWII. There is a strong Christian tradition for opposing all war, and it is legitimate to believe in that, so long as you accept that it requires that all war is always and everywhere wrong (which means no "WWII was a good war" cop-outs). The origin for this view is in the non-resistance of Christ, a doctrine that generally gets misinterpreted as non-violent resistance (a side point, but one frequently brought out by the anti-war left). Anyway, the upshot of Niebuhr's essay was that most people who oppose a given war are not thoroughgoing pacifists, and really just use pacifism as a way to cover-up their actual agenda.