Habemus Obama?

When a new Pope is selected by the College of Cardinals, the public announcement is made, "Habemus Papum" (we have a Pope). After Obama's convincing win in Wisconsin, it looks like habemus Obama for the Democratic nominee. He doesn't have the delegate majority yet. But, as Tom Hayden observes in We Have a Nominee! Huffington Post 02/19/08:

What about Hillary Clinton's "firewall" states of Ohio and Texas? When the balance of forces shifts in a competition, when the general offensive is on, little can hold it back. Wavering voters shift their allegiances. Donors defect. The calculation of electability shifts. The old leadership is staggered, off balance, the ground collapsing under their feet. Even if Clinton wins in Ohio and Texas, the margins will not be enough to block his momentum.

Josh Marshall, focusing a bit more narrowly on the electoral demographics, concurs (Gut Check Time TPM 02/20/08):

The premise of Clinton's campaign after Super Tuesday has been her trump cards of female voters and working class/lower income Democrats. But that assumption is due for a major reevaluation. In each successive contest he's cutting more into those core constituencies. Tonight in Wisconsin Obama tied Hillary among female voters and beat her by 10 points among voters making less than $50,000 per annum.

We've had four big post-Super Tuesday primaries - in LA, MD, VA and WI. The topline numbers in each were relatively similar - ranging from 17% in Wisconsin to 29% in Virginia. But the underlying story is that from Louisiana to the Chesapeake to Wisconsin, the underlying demographic structure of the electorate, the playing field, as it were, got better for her. But it didn't help.

That bold Maverick McCain, faithful friend of the Christian Right, is already leveling his attacks at Obama. For instance, the Maverick mocks Obama's visionary speeches as consisting of platitudes. Given what's already out there and what's coming in the months ahead, I certainly hope Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is wrong when he says, "Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter." (A Clinton Surrogate, A Dem Divide? by Dominico Monenaro MSNBC 02/20/08) And if you think that was a rough line from Buffenbarger, you're probably better off avoiding all news of the Presidential election until mid-November 2008. Because we ain't seen nothin' yet.

And no one should kid themselves about the ugly racial politics that have already been percolating up from the Republican id. The invaluable Bob Somerby has been following how the Establishment media has been quick to conjure up racial politics out of any allusion to voter demographics by the Clinton campaign. Most national political reporters regard Clinton as the Wicked Witch, so those mostly fake accusations of "playing the race card" have been directed at her, while parallel observations by the Obama camp have not been so regarded.

But now that their Wicked Witch is looking vanquished, the "press corps" will quickly begin slotting Obama into their standard mold for Democratic Presidential candidates: a flip-flopper, weak on national defense, effeminate, unsure of his own identity, lacking a coherent message. While Maverick McCain's ditziest ramblings will be treated as evidence of his sterling principles.

One of the most idiotic comments I've ever heard from a Big Pundit came from Newsweek's Jon Meacham in his Meet the Press appearance of 01/20/08:

MS. NORRIS: I mean, they [the Republicans] actually will talk openly about bringing Barack Obama down a few notches because they want to run against Hillary.

MR. MEACHAM: Because it's a known known, to give Secretary - former Secretary Rumsfeld his due. Hillary Clinton, they know what to do. Barack Obama, how do you run against the first African American nominee? It explodes all conventional campaign dogma in ways that completely will surprise and pleasantly and unpleasantly perhaps as they go forward. And I that that that's the - one of the things that's so scary about Obama to Republicans is they don't how to run against him. (my emphasis)

As I said at the time, the national Republican Party has been campaigning against black people since 1964. That's how they made the states of the former Confederacy their main base, by attracting the segregationist vote to the Republican Party through their "Southern Strategy" which everyone knew they were persuing but they always officially denied having.

We're already seeing how the press and Republican partisans are working to keep the race issue in play. Currently, the press script for the issue is that the Wicked Witch Hillary Clinton has been using race to polarize white voters against Obama. But now that Clinton's prospects for the nomination are rapidly receding, before you know it we'll be hearing about the Obama campaign is cynically "playing the race card" and unfairly accusing St. McCain the great Maverick and his new, improved Republican Party of racism.

Here are a few samples of the current state of play of the race issue. Carolyn Lochhead, a faithful reporter of conventional press wisdom, recently wrote about how Obama's candidacy shakes up racial politics San Francisco Chronicle 02/17/08. These are paragraphs two through four:

It was former President Bill Clinton who called the racial divide "America's constant curse" in his second inaugural address 11 years ago.

But it was after Bill Clinton injected race into the South Carolina primary last month that African Americans, one of the Democratic Party's most important voting blocs, abandoned his wife's candidacy in droves.

Obama's novelty is not that he is the first black candidate for president, but the first black candidate who is not running as a black candidate. Obama has scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping, yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match.

As Bob Somerby has been known to say, gaze on the empty soul of your press corps.

Yes, in the strange and alien world on which Carolyn Lochhead report as they practice their arcane version of journalism, it was vile, racist Bill Clinton who "injected race into the South Carolina primary". Now, here in the world most of us mere mortals inhabit, it was the mainstream press corps who applied some bizarre, mystical reading of various comments by the hated Clintons to declare they were "injecting race" into the Presidential contest. True, Bill Clinton's remark after the South Carlina primary comparing Obama's win there to Jesse Jackson's in a previous contest could be twisted with somewhat less difficulty into a remark "injecting race", though that was scarcely a legitimate interpretation.

But, according to Lochhead, Obama in his contest against the Wicked Witch has "scrupulously avoided racial stereotyping". But then she continues in the same sentence to say, "yet his race is an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match". After all the talk about the "Bradley effect" in which white voters are thought to be reluctant to admit to pollsters that they are voting against an African-American candidate, now it's obvious to Lochhead that being African-American is an advantage for Obama, "an obvious element of his appeal that no rival can match".

Yes, that's how reality looks to our sad excuse for a press corps. When the vile, awful Clintons even mention something about Obama's appeal to black voters, that's obviously racist campaigning. Yet as the Obama's campaign against St. McCain is appearing as the most likely shape of the Presidential general election, it's obvious, people, that Obama race is a key part of his appeal! And, no, writing such wildly contradictory things in two successive paragraphs doesn't seem to bother this unique group of people who report on our political campaigns. And, yes, it's hard to see how democracy can survive a press corps this broken over the long run.

You get the drift of Lochhead's sad report. One last quote from it also illustrates the modus operandi of our press corps:

It seems odd that during a time of war and terrorism, a mortgage crisis, health care worries and a teetering economy, that race would assert itself. Last summer, the Democratic contest seemed destined to focus on Iraq. Instead, it has become a lesson in demography.

If a report was being written about Planet Earth, it would say instead that during a time of war and terrorism, etc., the political press corps and punditocracy would obsess about race in the way they have. But in the world of press conventional wisdom, race asserted itself. It wasn't inserted by a badly broken press corps, oh no.

Here's rightwing hack Jonah Goldberg's take on it from last week: Obama's rhetoric, American realities Los Angeles Times 02/12/08:

There's more than a little truth here. It seems that Barack Obama can win blacks and that he can win whites; where he has trouble, electorally speaking, is winning blacks and whites.

You wouldn't know this from all the resplendent rhetoric about Obama's gorgeous mosaic of a campaign. Indeed, the audacity of Obama's hype is a marvel to behold.

No, that doesn't really make sense as analysis of the real world. But, remember, today's Republicans regard Rush Limbaugh the OxyContin Man and Mad Annie Coulter as sensible political pundits.

What good Republicans white folks are likely to take from columns like this is something along the lines of, "I wouldn't vote against a candidate because he's black. But I'm also going to stand bravely against the pressure of Political Correctness that expects me to vote for Obama because he's black. And that's obviously how he's campaigning."

Jonah tells us that "let the record show, there is a powerful thirst for a post-racial America, not least among conservatives." (my emphasis) Do I see a column on the "liberal plantation" hatching in the man's narrow little mind? Check this out:

Perhaps rather than serving to heal America's racial wounds, maybe Obama's campaign is more like a dye marker that helps us better diagnose the complexity of the problem.

Obama has had his greatest success winning white votes in states that are nearly all white, particularly those with caucuses. In non-homogeneously white states, he's only won when he's added enormous shares of black votes to his prosperous white liberal base - as he did in South Carolina.

For quite a while, I've been talking about Republican "neosegregationism". But this stuff is so much like the "oldo" version, just plain old "segregationist" is probably more accurate. (Translation for polite Yankees who prefer to believe the best of Republican white folks: "whites who actually know what those people are like wouldn't vote for one of 'em.")

Then there's is the ultimate hack, Dear Leader Bush's favorite historian - who else - Victor Davis Hanson. He writes in The Candidate, Starring Barack Obama Tribune Media Services (dated 02/18/08 at VDH's home page, but was published as early as 02/14/08) that Obama is a big phony because he's only half black but he's pretending to be black because, you know, being black is such a big advantage for a Presidential candidate due to the Political Correctness pressure to vote for him. Pressure before which all good, brave, conservative non-conformists and individuals will refuse to bow, of course. Here's Vic:

Obama's father was from Kenya, and he grew up for a time in Indonesia. But, otherwise, Obama was raised by his white mother and grandparents in a middle-class suburb in Hawaii - a unique upbringing in the 1970s but hardly so in today's multiracial and itinerant America.

At private school, he was sometimes known as Barry. Perhaps had he taken the name of his maternal family who raised him - Dunham - a Sen. Barry Dunham of mixed ancestry from Illinois would now not be causing quite the same sensation.

Indeed, a Sen. Dunham may have been viewed as a minority candidate to the same limited degree that a similar staid-sounding Gov. Bill Richardson resonated as a Mexican American.

For those who aren't up on their oldie movies, The Candidate of Vic's title is a movie in which Robert Redford plays a Senate candidate who is a big old phony.

The fall campaign is taking shape.

Tags: barack obama, carolyn lochhead, jon meachem, jonah goldberg, race, victor davis hanson

Debunking Victor Davis Hanson's history

VCH holding forth in 2005

Matthew Duss at the TAPPED blog takes a look at The Meaning and Purpose of [Victor Davis] Hanson 01/01/08, reportedly George W. Bush's favorite historian and a star of the neoconservative circuit. Duss' summary:

Hanson's purpose ... is to present history as one long war between us and the barbarians, a parade of brave Western leaders using cunning and innovation to hold off successive waves of savage Orientals, of which radical Islamism is only the latest. Ignoring the fact that Islamic civilization drew upon, was influence by, and preserved the knowledge, arts, philosophy, and learning of antiquity before sharing them with "barbaric" Europe, Hanson simply edits those centuries out in order to present an unbroken line from the Greeks through the Romans to "the West" and prop up a hoary old "clash of civilizations" thesis.

He also references a series of posts by Bob Bateman at Eric Alterman's Altercation home base, which address the VDH version of history. The first of them is apparently this one: Bateman on Hanson: An Altercation Altercation 10/22/07.

Tags: bob bateman, michael duss, victor davis hanson

VDH Watch 5: London calling Vic

Of course our man Vic had to share his strategic wisdom and his ueberhack historical analogies with us about the London bombings. First up: The Same Old, Same Old ...: An anatomy of the London bombing by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online 07/08/05. Also at VDH's home page.

Vic is sounding a bit war-on-terror weary in this one. He starts of with, "The British may react very differently than the Spanish did after Madrid - by doing nothing rather than by retreating from Iraq."

Then he mourns about the decadent West, Arab hordes of various kinds, whiny Muslims who blame all us Good People for their problems, and yadda, yadda. Vic kind of thinks that if us Good People could just all agree to hate somebody - Evil Muslims, preferably - that everything would be okay. Like in the good old days:

In WWII we didn't care much whether in fighting Bushido some thought we were in a war against Buddhists. We weren't, and that was enough. [Does anyone know what this sentence means? - Bruce]

We knew the enemy were Nazis, not simply Germans, and didn't froth and whine to prove that distinction.

But not now.

To criticize Islamic fascism is supposedly to be unfair to Islam, so we allow on our own shores mullahs and madrassas to spread hatred and intolerance, as part of our illiberal acceptance of "not offending Islam."

Actually, Vic, strictly speaking, most of those German soldiers were not Nazis, or at least not Nazi Party members. But we'll just glide over that for now. Vic's Second World War analogies are such a feast of hackery we don't need to bother with the crumbs.

Not to get all political-sciency here or anything. But it was actually only the German enemies who were Nazis (short for National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP). Italy was ruled by Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party. The concept of "fascism" has been as a generic term to include the NSDAP, Francisco Franco's Spanish Falangists, and others. The Blue Voice's own Dave (BuddhaGem) ventured where angels, historians and political scientists often fear to tread and took a stab at defining fascism just recently.

Actually, there is a serious discussion about whether German Nazism should be considered fascism, or a distinct form of dictatorship.

Then there were the Japanese militarists. I can't say that Vic is the first I've seen call them fascists. But I really can't recall the last time I heard that classification, if ever.

But what the heck? That was the Good War, the enemy was Nazis or something Evil like that, and we all united against them and felt good about. So let's just label the Evil Muslims "fascists", or Nazis, or Redcoats, who cares, as long we make war on them to the end of time. Or until the arms manufacturers and various and sundry other war profiteers can make bigger bucks with China as the Great Yellow Peril. Or Red peril. Whatever.

You just gotta love Vic's Second World War analogies. Prime hackery every time.

The rest is a little nightmare to entertain the faithful: Taliban in Lodi, Saudi villains, Pakistani generals (wait- aren't they part of the Good People this month?), imams in London, terrorists, Madrid, London, pacifists, Western apologists for Evil Muslims (or is that apologists for pacifists?), Syrians, spaced-out Arab teenagers, bleeding-heart Westerners, they're after our oil, and watch out for appeasers.

By the end of the column, we're on the verge of the Dark Ages again.

And as a bonus, Vic shares this article with us at his Web site: Jihad Is Knocking: Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam by Bruce Thornton 07/09/05

Thorton tells us we did have to worry about thinking what particular actions and issues motivate the jihadists. It's real simple, according to him: they're Muslims and that's just what Muslims do:

Believing this delusion requires that one ignores fourteen centuries of Islamic jihad against the West, a war of conquest and colonization ratified by centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence. Indeed, what we call Islamic radicals are in fact Islamic traditionalists; it is the so-called "moderates" - those wanting to compromise Islam so it can coexist with Western ideas such as secular government, separation of church and state, and human rights - who are the radicals and innovators. The terrorists are simply fulfilling the traditional and orthodox command of their religion to battle the infidels who resist the revelation of Mohammed and the global socio-political order mandated by Islam.

Actually, I believe that was the Christians that took that position. But, psah, they're Islamofascists and stuff and they hate our freedoms so they must want to take over the world like Hitler did.

Although Thorton isn't necessarily addressing Christian Right fans more than secular rightwingers here, this is the sort of pseudohistorical nonsense that the Christian Right is often all too eager to swallow.

And what would a conservative polemic against those Evil Muslims be without a dig at the cowardly Europeans:

The next few weeks will show whether the British have advanced as far down the road of dhimmitude as have the Spaniards, who responded to the murder of their citizens not with the force and resistance their ancestors showed for seven centuries, but with fear and appeasement.

I should stop now, I know. We've got to save something for future VDH Watches. But I'm sure our man Vic will come through. Besides, I'm a bit behind, and that column was over a week ago. I'm dying to know: have we entered the Dark Ages yet? Have the British become a new generations of gutless Chamberlain-like European wimps yet? Let's look at one more.

A couple of days later Vic was explaining How to Lose a War 07/11/05. And it looks like quite a war. In just the first two paragraphs, we're being menanced by Evil Muslims (of course!) - millions and millions of Evil Muslims, I'm telling you!! - Pakistanis, Syria, Algeria, Muslim dictators of all shapes and sizes, the Taliban, Iran, Saddam (didn't we capture him already?), Saudi princes, and Egyptians. Wow! Oh, and Morocco.

Something tells me Vic may have been staying up late watching 50s science fiction movies on late-night marathons:

Islamicist ganglia go deep into the central nervous system of the Pakistani intelligence service, not to mention the House of Saud.

Yeah, I remember that one! There were invisible brains flying around and attaching themselves to the backs of people's heads and stuff.

So, how do we lose the war? Well, there are several ways that all seem to be variations on not recognizing that there are millions and millions of Evil Muslims out to get us. Not because of anything the US might be involved in or doing in its foreign policy (e.g., Iraq). No, certainly not. It's because they're Evil Muslims and they hate our freedoms. Or maybe they're just evil.

Oh, but those aren't our only war-losing risks:

Fourth, and most important, the terrorists and their supporters understand that in a strange way the West is not only split, but also increasingly illiberal as well. It has lost confidence in its old commitment to rationalism, free speech and empiricism, and now embraces the deductive near-religious doctrines of moral equivalence and utopian pacifism. Al Qaeda's supporters will say that Thursday's victims were killed because of Afghanistan or Iraq. Westerners will duly repeat the dull refrain that "Bush lied, thousands died" in their guilt-ridden search for something we did to cause this.

And so, rather than focus our attention on the madrassas and the mosques that preach hatred, we will strive to learn more about Islamic culture, as if our own insensitivity were the true culprit. Our grandfathers could despise Bushido - Japan's warrior cult - without worrying whether they were being unfair to Buddhists; we of less conviction and even less courage, cannot do likewise.

The West has embraced "utopian pacifism". You know, that explains a lot. Everywhere I've travelled the last few years, I keep running into charolers walking the streets at all hours singing, "All we are saying/Is give peace a chance." Now, I like the song, but ten or twelve times a day every day is a bit much! That contagion of utopian pacifism explains it, though.

I don't know what it is with Vic and the Bushido thing lately. But it does have some intersting possibilities. Bushido ... warrior cult ... it has kind of a ring about it, doesn't it?

Vic says:

In short, we now know what to expect from the London bombings and the others to follow. There will be no effort to punish the states that subsidize al Qaeda. Critics will cling to the myth that the British got what they had coming. The primary obsession of many Westerners will be to extend sensitivity to Islam, not the victims of those who kill in its name. And all will be consoled that just a few dozen were harvested this time.

I'm beginning to see Vic's point here. A terrorist group composed of radical Islamic British Pakistanis set off bombs in London. So if go bomb Mecca or somewhere like that, that would be getting to the source of things, now wouldn't it? And only wusses would worry about repercussions. The Evil Muslims are going to keep bombing anyway. So if we start wars with another Muslim country or two or three. Hmmm, maybe I'm not quite getting this yet.

Now that I think about it, is there supposed to be a point? Or is it just endless reminders from Vic that Muslims and Arabs and various other exotic types from former Asian colonies of Britain are all our enemies forever and ever and ever?

I can't wait to see what our man Vic and people by Bruce Thornton say if Warlord Bush actually does pull out a substantial number of troops from Iraq. Heck, I could almost write the columns myself. There are two ways to go: (1) it's a brilliant success and a sign of what wonderful progress we've made; (2) it's dangerous appeasement but the Democrats and the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press! are to blame. Mix in a few lame historical analogies and you've got six months of VDH columns there.

Maybe Vic will hire me to ghost-write for him. But for that kind of high-intensity hackery, he'll have to pay me big bucks.

Tags: london bombing 2005, vdh watch, victor davis hanson

VDH Watch 4: VDH prepares his stab-in-the-back theory for the Iraq War

Vic is cooking the historical books once again: Real Lesson of Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson: 07/04/05. (Also available in Jewish World Review 07/30/05 issue). And would we settle for less from our man Vic? I should hope not!

According to VDH, The Terrorists are trying to break the public's Will, which in the Republican Party line equates to support of whatever the Bush position on Iraq is at the moment (my emphasis):

The al Qaedists and former Ba'athists anticipate another impending U.S. retreat, like the 1984 flight from Lebanon or the 1993 exit from Somalia after the horrific dragging of American bodies in the streets of Mogadishu. Both pullouts, enshrined in al Qaeda propaganda, contributed to the pre-September 11, 2001, folklore that the United States lacked the stamina to defeat terrorists.

So the media-savvy terrorists have redirected their attacks yet again - back to American troops. Just last week, female Marines, who allay Iraqi unease over the searching of Iraqi women at checkpoints, were blown up aboard an armored truck returning to base from a checkpoint.

Here is the heart of Vic's "lesson" for us:

By 1973, the goal of fashioning a South Korean-like, noncommunist entity in Indochina was supposedly obtained and the war over. The Paris peace agreements recognized two autonomous Vietnamese states. Almost all American prisoners were returned. The last few U.S. ground troops came home.

If the communist North, and its Soviet and Chinese patrons, saw 1973 as a breather rather than a peace, American officials at least promised the South material support and air cover if the communists reinvaded.

They did just that in spring 1975, barreling down Highway 1 with conventional Soviet tanks. Americans apparently did not want another quarter-century commitment to a second Demilitarized Zone to ward off a perpetual communist threat from the north. By 1974, a series of congressional acts radically cut funding of U.S. military support of South Vietnam. The Saigon government abruptly collapsed in April 1975.

And this is the grand conclusion he draws from it:

There are lessons here. When the United States has stayed on after fighting dictatorial enemies - admittedly for decades in Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea and the Balkans - progress toward democracy and prosperity ensued. Disengagement from unresolved messy problems - whether from Europe after World War I, Vietnam in 1973, Beirut after the Marine barracks bombings, Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat, or Iraq in 1991 - only left murderous chaos or the "peace" of dictators.

Yes, when it comes to cranking out hack work, Vic is consistently superlative.

Before we take some time to savor the full extent of his hackery on this one, we should keep in mind that his column is not really about Vietnam. You have to wonder if historical events register in the minds of Bush Doctrine fans as being anything independent of the latest Party slogan. But in any case, this is really an early version of the civilian incarnation of the stab-in-the-back theory to divert responsibility for the disaster in Iraq from the Bush dynasty and their subservient Republican Party onto someone else, i.e., the Democrats.

Also, it would be a shame to spoil our admiration of a truly fine hack job by too many pithy comments. But I can't resist one or two. Now, Vic likes to tell us about "Islamofascism" and how bad it all is. And Dear Leader Bush constantly tells us how The Terrorists hate everything we stand for, hate our freedoms, want to kill us, have no civilized values at all and so on and so forth. Well, if all this is so, why does Vic rely on Al Qaeda propaganda claims to say what American policy should be?

Yeah, Bin Laden would make fun of Bush's private parts if the US withdrew from Iraq. Withdrawing would also deprive the jihadist groups of their most potent recruiting tool of the moment. The fact that Al Qaeda would give their own propaganda spin to it doesn't make it a bad idea from the US point of view. They're puuting a propaganda spin our our staying in Iraq, as well. There's a serious lack of sense in this way of approaching things.

Now, let's go back to a primary source on this particular rightwing fairy tale. Richard Nixon in his No More Vietnams (1985) devotes a chapter to "How We Lost the Peace." Before we explore a "reality-based" version, we'll look at Tricky Dick's. In Tricky's version, as in VDH's, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords gave South Vietnam a solid basis to survive in political and military competition with North Vietnam. But the cowardly, wimpy Congrss blew it:

Congress proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Since our troops were out of Vietnam, Congress initiated a total retreat from our commitments to the South Vietnamese people. First, it destroyed our ability to enforce the peace agreement, through legislation prohibiting the use of American military power in Indochina. Then it undercut South Vietnam's ability to defend itself, by drastically reducing our military aid. Within two years the balance of power swung decisively in Hanoi's favor. When the North Vietnamese Army was poised to launch its final offensive, South Vietnam's army was in its weakest condition in over five years, reeling from the effects of congressional budget cuts that had strapped it with severe fuel and ammunition shortages.

Can't you feel the contrast to Vic's hackery already? I mean, put VDH up against a world-class liar like Nixon, and you almost feel sorry for him. Compared to the real thing, Vic is just a pale, pale imitation. I love that "total retreat from our commitments" bit, which we'll explore more in a moment. Tricky Dick doesn't mention there that one of "our commitments" was a letter of 02/01/73 that he kept secret from Congress, and possibly even from Secretary of State William Rogers, and was first released in 1977 under pressure from Congress. It promised the following (my emphasis):

1. The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions.

2. Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over five years. ...

Could that have been a pledge of what in all but name were reparation payments to Communist North Vietnam pledged by a Republican president? Pledging unconditionally even? For beter or worse, this commitment was not fulfilled. No Republicans fretted over much about how not living up to that commitment would undercut our credibility and yadda, yadda.

In the Nixon version, everthing would have been fine if the Democratically-controlled Congress had just appropriated every dollar the Nixon and Ford administration had requested for the Thieu regime in South Vietnam, and also employed American air power to assist them in conventional warfare against the North Vietnamese PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam).

But one thing that could make a person almost nostalgic for Nixon's brand of lying is that he managed to mix it up with enough truths and partial truths that you actually had to think carefully to distinguish them. For example, this is true: "Our [i.e., US] military power was the principal disincentive to Hanoi's breaking the cease-fire."

Especially given that Tricky Dick was laying out a stab-in-the-back argument, its fairly remarkable that he would admit that. In fact, Nixon's 1973 agreement would hve required a long-term, effectively permanent US military presence and participation in combat operations for who knows how many years to come, if it was going to guarantee the survival of an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam (which had been the war aim from the start). There was nothing remarkable - and I'm confident that Nixon himself knew this - about the fact that Congress wouldn't go along.

And if you read Nixon's argument closely, even he is saying that it wasn't just Democrats or liberals that were oppossed to maintaining an active military role in Vietnam after the 1973 agreement. Without going into the details of his agreement, he gripes that Congress by banning US military operations and also by refusing to grant the aid to North Vietnam, "both the carrots and the sticks" had been removed, and "Hanoi as a result had no reasons to comply with [the agreement's] terms." Watch closely now for a pure Nixonian approach (my emphasis):

The antiwar sentiment was largely limited to Indochina. While some media critics irresponsibly charged that I called an alert of United States forces during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 solely to divert attention from Watergate, there was overwhelming support in the Congress for the massive airlift and other military actions I took to save Israel. But Vietnam was different. Without Watergate, we would have faced the same opposition to our use of military power to enforce an agreement that would bring peace to Vietnam.

I was caught off-guard by the intensity of this backlash. ...

We could not find strong support for our policy in any quarter. ...

Hawks supported the American war effort initially. But its length had taken its toll. As the war became more unpopular, they tired of the struggle and kept a low profile politically. I could still count on their votes during the war, and most remained true to our cause afterward. But none was willing to lead the charge on Capitol Hill.

In other words, the American people were sick of the Vietnam War. They didn't believe it was worth the continuing cost it was demanding. And that sentiment was reflected in Congress on both sides of the aisle. It wasn't an unwillingness to confront substantial threats to American national security or a general abandonment of allies, as Nixon explains there. It's just that sometimes, you have to recognize that a lost cause is a lost cause. And that was one of those times.

But Nixon being Nixon, even after that fairly frank recognition that the public and Congress were done with the war after the 1973 agreement, he comes back with the kind of accusation that so endeared him to his younger admirers like Karl Rove, Rummy and Dick Cheney (my emphasis):

I was shocked by the irresponsibility of the antiwar majority in Congress.
...

I could understand their desire to put the Vietnam War behind us. But I could not understand why they seemed so determined to see South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam. Whatever their intentions, that was the effect of their actions.

What's sad and almost nostalgic about that is that even rank demagoguery like that seems almost tame by the standards of today's Birchified and OxyContin-ed Republican Party. How much better off we would be if we only had to deal with Nixon's level of dishonesty in the national government today. (A reminder of Molly Ivins' warning that no matter how bad things get, there's always a chance that we'll look back on today as the "good old days." Yikes!)

I know this is long, but I promised to put in a reality-based version. And sometimes, it's just nice to take your time and savor the true extremes of hackery that are available for those who look.

Okay, to the reality-based part. Was it only the alleged faint-heartedness of Congress that stood in the way of South Vietnam's victory over the North Vietnamese PAVN? Well, even after American efforts beginning in 1961 to build up the South Vietnamese government and army, by 1973 they still were not able to survive on their own, politically or militarily, even with continuing American aid. One reason why is given by Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History (1983):

South Vietnam's crumbling economy eroded army morale, which had been surprisingly high until then. A survey conducted during the summer of 1974 by the U.S. mission in Saigon found that more than 90 percent of the soldiers were not receiving enough in wages and allowances to sustain their families. Inflation was only one cause, however. Corruption was now exceeding all bounds as commanders robbed payrolls and embezzled other funds. Quartermaster units often insisted on bribes in exchange for delivering rice and other supplies to troops, and even demanded cash to furnish the fighting men with ammunition, gasoline, and spare parts. Officers frequently raised the money by squeezing local villagers, whose support they alienated in the process, and many traded with the Communists privately. The American report cautioned that the "deterioration" had to be halted "if the South Vietnamese military is to be considered a viable force." Ambassador Martin dismissed the warning with a tired cliche: "a little corruption oils the machinery." There was nothing he could do, in any case. Thieu's wife and cronies and their wives, indifferent to the danger, were reaping fortunes in real estate and other deals, and they set the code of misconduct for the entire officialdom. Or as an old Vietnamese adage put it: "A house leaks from the roof."

Congress authorized $1 billion in aid for South Vietnam in 1974, but appropriated only $700 million. Did that cut the feet from under our allies who would otherwise have won?

Karnow again (my emphasis):

[US] Ambassador [to South Vietnam Graham] Martin and others were to assert that the cuts in U.S. assistance had prevented the South Vietnamese from resisting the Communists effectively, but a Pentagon study later noted that only about two fifths of the $700 million allocated actually reached Vietnam; the rest was committed to equipment that awaited shipment or had not yet been spent.

Yes, hard as it may be for the Victor Davis Hansons of the world to recognize (at least in their published utterances), not all events in the world can be dictated by the will of Washington.

But would American airpower have made a decisive difference in the outcome of the conventional-war battles of 1975? Air power true believers would insist that it did. But Jeffrey Record is more convincing when he writes in The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998) (my emphasis):

Aside from the venality and professional incompetence of much of its senior officer corps, the [South Vietnamese] RVNAF [armed forces] could hardly be expected to shoulder the immense technical and logistical demands imposed upon it by the American style of warfare it was trained and equipped to wage. Though by 1975 the war had been thoroughly Vietnamized, the RVNAF had been transformed into a military force incapable of sustaining itself in combat, notwithstanding the mountains of American military equipment and ammunition that were transferred to the RVNAF between 1973 and 1975. Vietnamization, wrote a young Sen. Sam Nunn on the eve of Hanoi's final offensive, "has resulted in the Americanization of the Vietnamese" via "the dumping of massive amounts of military equipment and supplies on a South Vietnamese force that was unprepared and incapable of coping with the logistics and maintenance requirements related to that equipment.

"There was no more reason to have confidence in U.S. air power than in Vietnamization. Even if Congress had been prepared to approve a post-Paris U.S. reentry into the Vietnam War - which it manifestly was not - it is far from clear that any amount of U.S. bombing, absent a return of U.S. ground forces, could have thwarted Hanoi's ultimate victory in the South. At no time during the war had bombing succeeded either in shutting off the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail or in compelling Hanoi to negotiate a settlement on terms that precluded reasonable chances for Vietnam's subsequent forcible reunification. Linebacker II, the so-called "Christmas bombing" of targets in and around Hanoi in 1972, was launched in part to persuade Hanoi to accept settlement terms additional to those which it had already accepted the preceding October but on which the United States, because of bitter South Vietnamese objections, sought to renege.

It's true, as Record says (my emphasis):

The United States abandoned its cause in Indochina because it was strategically, politically, fiscally, and morally exhausted. Never prepared (nor should it have been) to make anything remotely approaching the proportional sacrifices in blood and treasure in Indochina that its communist enemy was willing to—and did—make, and being a democracy in which official policy fundamentally hostile to the electorates wishes could not be indefinitely pursued, the United States withdrew from Vietnam because it had no other choice.

But to simply label this a contemptible failure of "will" is as ahistorical as it is foolish. Every war involves some calculation of costs and benefits, however warped those may be by emotion and war fever. The United States disengaged from Vietnam after investing an enormous amount of lives, money and effort into supporting an ally that was never able to carry its war on its own.

Deciding enough was enough at that point was a realistic judgment of American interests, however influenced that may be by emotion and war weariness. Did that decision meet with the approval of the enemy in Hanoi? Yes. But that didn't make it a wrong decision for the US, anymore than Al Qaeda's propaganda provides a reliable guidepost to what American policies should be in 2005, 30 years after the fall of Saigon. It was a recognition of reality. A better understanding of Vietnamese realities and a more sober view of American interests in that region in the early 1960s would have avoided a great deal of unnecessary killing and destruction.

Record concludes, looking at the whole period of the Vietnam War:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the United States lacked any strtegically decisive and morally acceptable war-winning military options in the Vietnam War. Options considered - and not considered - were either peripheral or, if potent and at least theoretically decisive, unacceptable. The military's vain push for ground war options in Laos and Cambodia and expanded air war options against North Vietnam was a push, in effect, for an extension of the military stalemate in Indochina at a higher and more costly level of violence, though these rebuffed options continue to serve the cause of those who believe that the Vietnam War was a case of American self-defeat.

VDH's stab-in-the-back whining is as vapid today as it was in 1975. It's just that in 1975, fewer people were willing to swallow such nonsense after all those years of the Vietnam War.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: iraq war, jeffrey record, nixon, stab-in-the-back, stanley karnow, vdh watch, victor davis hanson, vietnam war

VDH Watch 3: Vic pulls a Rove

Man, if our guy Vic keeps up like this, I may have to start doing joint posts of the VDH Watch and the Chuckie Watch. He barely manages to hang on to the "middle-brow" posture in this one: The Politics of American Wars National Review Online 06/24/05. (Also available at VDH's Web site.)

Vic's got the vocabulary. But the average factory or farm worker has better judgment by far than this guy.

Oh, and Vic seems to have fallen off the wagon pretty quickly on trying to stay away from bad historical analogies.

But I'm hesitant to even comment on this one. Because James Wolcott has already taken it on: A-Roving We Will Go 06/24/05. And trying to top or even compete with a James Wolcott takedown is a futile mission. Part of Wolcott's take:

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson, who's supposed to be one of the Mature Voices on NRO, has pulled a Karl Rove.

As Karl Rove recently said - well, everyone knows what he oinked. Bush apologists at NRO are falling all over themselves to defend Bush's spongy gray matter, deploying every bit of sophistry they have at their greasy fingertips. ...

And today Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson contributes his own more tasteful flavor of McCarthyism. Ignoring the snickers of the peanut gallery, he argues that conservatives have a harder time waging war than do liberals, which will come as news to the moaning ghost of LBJ. Here is his reasoning: "In a leisured and liberal society, it is very difficult in general for a conservative to wage war, because the natural suspicion arises - as a result of the conservative's tragic view of human nature and his belief in the occasional utility of force - that he enjoys the enterprise far more than a lip-biting progressive, who may in fact order more destruction."

It's certainly news to me that the conservative George Dubya nurses a "tragic view of human nature," or even a mildly saturnine one. He is forever thumping on in public about how optimistic he is and in private giving the rhetorical buzzoff to what he calls "handwringers."

Helen Thomas has hinted loudly that Bush is the one president in her long memory who wanted to go to war. Kicking off a war with a "Shock and Awe" extravanganza certainly does not suggest the sobriety and gravity Bush idolators such as Peggy Noonan attribute to him.

I would also add that Davis' thoughts on liberal presidents and war are, in addition to what Wolcott described, a repackaged version of an Old Right staple that we don't hear a lot from Republicans these days, the "Democrat wars" line, the idea that Democratic presidents cause wars and therefore the Democratic Party is the war party. With Warlord Bush happily declaring himself a "war president" and posing in military settings and military garb every time he gets the chance, whining about "Democrat wars" in the old-fashioned way isn't considered cool among the Party faithful. So our man Vic has repackaged it this way.

Bob Dole kind of buried the old version in his 1976 vice-presidential campaign, using it in a way that came off as a foot-in--mouth exhibition. Jules Witcover descibes the moment in Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1976 (1977). During the vice-presidential candidates' debate, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale had just criticized President Ford for having given a presidential pardon to Richard Nixon:

Dole shot back that the issue of Watergate wasn't a very good campaign issue, "any more than the Vietnam war would be, or World War One or World War Two or the Korean War - all Democrat wars, all in this century." (He used, of course, the abbreviated name of the opposition party that has long been an expression of contempt from the mouths of many Republicans.) And then, noting that he himself still carried the wounds of World War II, he added: "I figured up the other day if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Mondale, who had shaken off his early nervousness and was crisp and aggressive, was incredulous but calm. "I think that Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man tonight. Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?"

This following part of Vic's column is a good example of how "totally muddled" can masquerade as "profound". Vic lays out a remarkably bizarre description of what he apparently thinks people should understand to be the American liberal position on jihadist terrorism. He uses the term "elite," which for the Radical Republicans means liberals for sure and also Jews, or Freemasons, or whatever bogeyman is convenient at the moment. It's also more than a bit strange that he uses the term "Western liberals," since continental European liberals have a very different ideological approach than American liberals; the word "liberal" just means drastically different things in Europe than in the US.

As September 11 faded in our collective memory, Muslim extremists were insidiously but systematically reinvented in our elite presentations as near underprivileged victims, and themselves often adept critics of purported rapacious Western consumerism, oil profiteering, heavy-handed militarism, and spiritual desolation.

Extremists who would otherwise be properly seen in the fascistic mold were instead given a weird pass for their quite public and abhorrent hatred of non-believers and homosexuals, and their Neanderthal views of women. Beheadings, the murder of Christians, suicide bombings carried out by children, systematic torture - all this and more paled in comparison to hot and cold temperatures in American jails on Cuba. Suddenly despite our enemies' long record of murder and carnage, we were in a war not with fascism of the old stamp, but with those who were historical victims of the United States. Thus problems arose of marshalling American public opinion against the supposedly weaker that posited legitimate grievances against Western hegemons. It was no surprise that Sen. Durbin's infantile rantings would be showcased on al-Jazeera. [Were Durbin's comments "showcased on al-Jazeera"? Inquiring minds want to know. - Bruce]

When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9/11 of "unity" and "European solidarity" what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic justice from a suddenly empowered other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, and had not yet "lashed out."

I guess if you repeat absurdities long enough, you actually start to believe them. Or at least forget that they're absurd. Let's not forget to note that Vic is defending torture by the US. In the quote above, he contrasts what Evil Muslims do ("torture") with what Americans do (set the air conditioning badly). Complaining about criminal torture in the Bush Gulag, as Durbin did, is just "infantile rantings." Grownups know that Real Men torture prisoners.

Marty Kottmeyer has described UFOlogy as an "evolving system of paranoia" that morphs and becomes more severe over time. Collective psychosis is a pretty mushy concept. But the far-right notion of liberals (American-style) as being supremely evil and anti-Christian and unpatriotic is in some way just such an "evolving system of paranoia." The notion of Democratic Party liberals harboring open enthusiasm for the most radical brands of Islamic fundamentalism is pretty whacko by any "reality-based" measure.

Out here in the real world, the Bush administration installed a religious-oriented, pro-Iranian Shia regime in Iraq.

But it's worth remembering in just what ways this notion of liberals sympathizing with jihadists is daft. In the real world, it is not only plausible but very likely that jihadist groups will find allies among non-Muslim Americans. But it's not likely to be liberals worried about public education, saving Social Security and nuclear nonproliferation. In Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003), Jessica Stern talks about what is really the closest we've seen so far to some kind of "left" sympathy for Islamic jihadists, which are former radical-leftists like Germany's Horst Mahler who have become far-right extremists.

She quotes Mahler as welcoming the 9/11 attacks, hoping that they will initiate "the end of the American Century, the end of Global Capitalism, and thus the end of the secular Yahweh cult, of Mammonism." I suppose if you are an OxyContin radio fan largely innocent of any actual knowledge of the anti-capitalist rhetoric used by the Nazis and some contemporary far-right groups, this might sound like a "left" - or even "liberal" (!!) - endorsement of Al Qaeda.

Stern also writes:

White supremacists and Identity Christians are applauding Al Qaeda's goals and actions and may eventually take action on the Al Qaeda network's behalf as freelancers or lone-wolf avengers. A Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber, who is popular with both Aryan youth and radical Muslims, is calling for neo-Nazis and Islamists to join forces. Huber was on the board of directors of the Al-Taqwa Foundation, which the U.S. government says was a major donor to Al Qaeda. The late William Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, applauded the September 11 bombers. Pierce's organization, the Alliance Nahad, urged its followers to celebrate the one-year anniversary of September 11 by printing out and disseminating flyers from its Web site. One of the flyers included a photograph of bin Laden and the World Trade Center and the caption, "Let's stop being human shields for Israel." Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization one of whose members killed a number of blacks and Jews, is disseminating a book that exposes the "sinister machinations" that led to September 11, including the involvement of Jews and Israelis, in particular, the Mossad.

But our guy Vic didn't go into that angle. In fact, it pretty much looks like he was only interested in accusing Democrats of being allies of The Terrorists. Or, in James Wolcott's memorable phrase, pulling a Rove.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: iraq war, vdh watch, victor davis hanson

VDH Watch 2: VDH shows us his sense of humor

When we last tuned in on Victor Davis Hanson, Vic was making an historical analogy about Hitler Germany that kind of makes your head dizzy. In fact, bad historical analogies are one of Vic's specialties. If his columns are any measure, he reels off bad historical analogies faster that Scott McClellan evades questions at the White House press gaggles.

But Vic clearly has a sense of humor, as he shows us in Hitler, Hitler Everywhere Jewish World Review 06/23/05. This column is about ... how Democrats make too many bad historical analogies! Specifically, about Hitler. (Also available at VDH's Web site.)

Was it just my imagination, or was there a period of, oh, about 20 years or so where conservatives ridiculed liberals for insisting on "political correctness"? Or has the Republican Party Politburo now written that out of history? Because it's kind of odd to see Republicans now fretting all over the place about how hurt their feelings are about all this naughty words that Democrats use now. Oops! Did I say "Politburo"? I hope that doesn't offend any tender Republican souls who might read this.

That whole Republican concept about "political correctness" always seemed a little daft to me. That's partially because I'm around a fair number of people for whom English is not their first language. And I found it well nigh impossible to explain to someone that when a person says something is "politically correct," it means that the speaker thinks it's politically incorrect. And even more specifically, politically incorrect in being too liberal. Or politically incorrect, in that sense. Whatever. I never could quite keep it straight.

Now, the examples he gives are not entirely clear to me. There's poor Dick Durbin, of course, who referred to Nazis in crticizing the Bush torture policy. Actually, Vic says that that Durbin "recently compared American behavior at Guantanamo Bay to that of "Nazis, ..." etc. And that was really naughty, accordint to VDH, because:

Time Magazine recently reported that when the suspected 20th Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, was in distress, he was given a CAT scan and put on a heart monitor, while a radiologist was flown to Cuba for consultation.

Golly, I thought Durbin was reading from an eyewitness report by an FBI agent about torture there. But now that I've read Vic's column, I can see that he was criticizing the fine health care being provided to Guantanmo prisoners when they are in "distress."

I guess the doctors do that in breaks between assisting in the torture. No, wait! The only mention of torture in Vic's column is one about Saddam Hussein's regime torturing prisoners. I hear they did a lot of that at Abu Ghuraib in Saddam's time. I mean, if Dick Durbin had been criticizing sick, sadistic criminal torture, VDH would surely have mentioned that in telling us about it, wouldn't he?

Apparently he thinks Dick Durbin is a Holocaust denier, too. That Vic, he's pretty creative with these things.

But Vic is a fair guy. He mentions the "occasional conservative" who makes a Hitler reference. Marcia Ellen just posted about this a couple of entries back. Maybe we should e-mail VDH some of Pat Robertson's imaginative comparisons about the Holocaust, one of which Marcia Ellen quotes. Because Vic seems to think that "most of the offenders ... are on the left, furious over their inability to affect the course of events."

Then there's some hand-wringing worry about how such rhetoric as Al Gore referring to "Digital brownshirts" (caution: there's is very sparse context to any of VDH's examples) could lead to violence. Gosh, Vic must be rending his clothing over Karl Rove trying to paint the entire Democratic Party as anti-American supporters of The Terrorists.

For a guy who's so finicky about history, its surprising to see this paragraph from him:

In contrast, is Sen. Durbin aware that the Nazis laid railroad tracks to the very gates of Auschwitz to facilitate its engine of mass death, an industry that would take over 6 million people? Or can he grasp the idea of 25 million perishing in the gulag — the population of Durbin's home state of Illinois being exterminated twice over?

It's not really clear exactly what the railroad tracks have to do with Durbin objecting to criminal torture being conducted by American officials. But I get the point that torture in the Bush Gulag is not nearly as extensive as the crimes of Hitler Germany or Stalinist Russia, which seems to be a good enough standard for Republican polemicists these days.

What surprises me is the, at best, carelessness with wording in laying out those facts. The six million number is certainly right for the number of Jews killed in the Shoah (Holocaust). But they weren't all killed at Auschwitz. It's not just a pedantic point. If you've had the dubious pleasure of trying to refute Holocaust deniers' arguments, you probably know this is one that can easily trip you up, as this Nizkor page explains: How many people died at Auschwitz?

Body counts are a grim part of history, and I must say that I have not followed this research on deaths in the Soviet gulag nearly as closely as the discussion over the Holocaust. But I'm pretty sure 25 million is on the high side of the estimates of deaths. But again, anyone who's poked around the gutter of far-right polemics will know to be one guard when you see a polemical point in the form of "the Nazis killed this many, the Commies killed so many more."

But since VDH thinks that he is refuting Durbin's (now tearfully retracted) criticism of torture in the Bush Gulag, the following is worth checking out. The great Maverick McCain suggested that Sen. Durbin be required to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago as a punishment for criticizing torture in the Bush Gulag. This blog provides some excerpts from that work: From Solzhenitsyn's Gulag: The Simplest Methods which Break the Will (via Tom Tomorrow). You may notice that some of the methods that he describes that as nasty torture don't sound as drastic as some of the "stress positions" that our torture advocates defend as relatively benign.

Now that VDH has seen the light on bad historical analogies, we'll be watching to see if our man Vic can stay away from them. Can he kick the habit? Or is he hopelessly hooked? For the answers, keep tuning in to the VDH Watch!

[Note: This post has been edited to correct the phrase "I have not followed".]

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: vdh watch, victor davis hanson

VDH Watch 1: VDH explains why Americans should love war

Since this is the first VDH Watch post, I'll do this one as kind of a stream-of-consciousness approach. In this one, we'll be looking at his column: Our Strange War National Review Online 06/03/05.

Hanson opens this column by offering us the grand vision of what he calls our "three-year-plus war" against "Islamic fascism."

He's apparently getting impatient with the pace of things, even though I suspect "three-year-plus" means for him an unending excuse for spending more on the military than all other countries of the world combined. There has been more time passed between the 9/11 attacks and now than the time between the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and V-J Day in 1945. So "three-years-plus" is a modest description.

Then he draws on one of those grand historical analogies of which Bush fans are so fond:

Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these "indigenous movements" and "deplore" such "terrorism," even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to "bridge the gap," and seek a "peaceful resolution," while we sought to "liberate" rather than defeat the German nation.

At this point, I find myself thinking, okay, let's walk thought it real slow and easy, Victor. (As I picture him saying that stuff aloud and making the little quotation mark gestures with his hands at the indicated points.) If Hitler had relied only on terrorists and saboteurs to annoy his neighbors, he wouldn't have built up a huge army instead. Which means he wouldn't have been in a position to snatch Czechoslovakia by threatening war. Or to march into Vienna. Or to attack Poland. Or invade the Soviet Union.

Then, the dizzy sensation in my head warns me that I'm on the wrong track. So I continue reading:

So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.

Muslims bad. Muslims are kinda like Hitler. Real Amurcans don't like Muslims. I get the drift, I think.

Now, VDH, with his Hoover Institute scholarship, tells us that these America-hating Muslims are also sneaky. Because lots of them admire the jihadists but don't want to say so out loud. Or maybe they insist on saying so only in Arabic, and, heck, who can understand that? And with a "leap of faith" (I can make the quote-mark gesture, too, just like Condi-Condi always does) that only true believers can manage - or columnists pandering to true believers - VDH explains that these same character flaws are what make Muslims want to emigrate:

This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.

Follow that? That peculiar feeling around your temples as you ponder it could be mistaken for the feeling of one's mind expanding. And if you just let it go at that, you can probably avoid the impending headache that it really is warning you about. If you want to turn it into a migrane, start pondering it next to the thought, "But I thought they hated us for our freedoms."

Fortunately, we wise Americans can step back and understand the failings of inferior peoples:

Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon's "pitiful, helpless giant") cannot or will not win the war.

Like a parent with a naughty child, a maddening forbearance is the order of the day: They burn American flags, behead, murder, and promise death and ruin to Americans; we ignore it and instead find new ways of displaying our sensitivity to Islam.

You tell 'em, Vic! Spare the rod and spoil the fascist child, I always say.

Okay, by now I feel the need to get to the end of this thing, to avoid headache and nausea. So, as we continue, we find that all the Muslim governments are to blame when some Muslim attacks Americans, that Muslims have a lot of oil but are still really backward - those Muslim natives just don't know how to handle their blessings, because they're like children, you know. And then "the West" has gone soft, with all this worrying about minorities and such, and fretting about the possible negative effects of bombing the beejeesus out of any country we feel like attacking. Too little power emboldens the fascists, VDH says.

Oh, and calling the network of torture chambers that the Bush administration has established at Guantanamo, Abu Ghruaib, Bagram and elsewhere a "Gulag" (actually, I prefer Al Gore's term "the Bush Gulag," myself) is evidence that "there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." What's the solution?

Well, VDH tells us, we have to stop thinking small. We have to kill the "Islamic fascists" and stop being so timid in the Middle East. Stabilize Iraq? Only wimps would be content with that! No, we have wage wars of liberation against Iran and Syria, too, to bring them the march of freedom that the Iraqi people are currently enjoying.

All right, I can't stand it any more! Let's break this mess down into its not-very-obscure ideological subtext. And it is ideological hackery from beginning to end. You could "fisk" every line, it's full of so many propaganda buzzwords. First, the Second World War and Hitler references are entirely frivolous in terms of analysis. They serve two main purposes: (1) to lend the positive image that the Second World War has in the minds of most Americans to Bush's wars; and, (2) to cast the battle against jihadists as a matter of conventional warfare between states. Also, terms like "Islamic fascist" or "Islamofascist" (with or without the Condi-Condi quote-sign gestures) are pretty much totally devoid of content. They're also conservative propaganda terms to identify their Dear Leader Bush' foreign policy with the Second World War.

If I were to pretend for a second that his "what-if" game about Nazi Germany had any substance, I would say that its so counter-factual as to be totally absurd. To imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party that wasn't fundamentally committed to conventional wars of conquest is to imagine a Hitler and a Nazi Party fundamentally different from the ones that actually existed.

Now that Bush himself has publicly embraced the John Birch Society notion that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were scheming to hand over all of eastern Europe to Stalin and the Commies, you might think the rightwingers would ease up on the Second World War references.

VDH's piece that I've quoted here seems to be nothing but ideological fluff to be "fixed around" the following notions:

1. Americans shouldn't worry about civilian casualities in Iraq or any other country the US invades. Why worry about Muslim mommas and their Muslim babies being killed if they are only going to raise those Muslim babies to be anti-American jihad-lovers? (If you don't think there are "respectable" white folks who make such arguments, you need to get out more.)

2. Invading pretty much any Muslim country we choose is okay, because they're all to blame for the 9/11 attacks.

3. Why fret about overt American attempts to control other countries' oil resources? The Muslims are too primitive and backward to manage them responsibly anyway.

4. The "war against terrorism" is a matter of invading and conquering Muslim countries of our choice.

5. When everyone is more-or-less forced to face the fact that the US has lost the Iraq War, don't blame staunch Republican rightwingers like VDH: look, he was saying we need to be tougher! It's those wimpy Democrats and whoever that undercut our grand crusade there.

Just for a glimpse at the heart of the ideology that VDH is really pushing let's go back to this sentence: "So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West." This sense of the Western democracies being decadent, weak and contemptible is far more widespread among today's Halliburton Republicans than most of them would like to admit. And not just among the religious ones, either.

If there were a Pulitzer Prize for hackery, Victor Davis Hanson would be an annual contender.

(See also the Index to the VDH Watch.)

Tags: global war on terror, long war, potsdam conference, second world war, vdh watch, victor davis hanson, war on terror

Introduction to the VDH Watch

Columnist Victor Davis Hanson is a popular "middle-brow" conservative commentator. He doesn't have Big Pundit status. But he speaks directly to the kind of angry white guys who would agree with Tom DeLay on most issues, but who would like to think of themselves as a bit more sophisticated than a tobacco-spittin' fan of OxyContin radio, and a bit less Puritanical than the no-sex-before-marriage virginity-pledgers.

People who don't really like to take the times to actually read books but who enjoy watching documentaries on the History Channel - popularly known as the Hitler Channel for all its programs on the Second World War (not because of a political slant) - find pleasant references to historical events in VDH's columns. After all, he even has the "high-brow" catchet of an association with Stanford's Hoover Institute.

At my own blog, I do an irregular feature called the Chuckie Watch, which focuses on a distinctly low-brow purveyor of the Patriotically Correct. Here at the Blue Voice, I'm initiating the VDH watch. My following post will be the first installment.

(See also the Index to the VDH Watch.)

Tags: vdh watch, victor davis hanson