The dishonorable left attempts to explain itself
No piece that I’ve read recently captures the dishonesty of the left any better than this column by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. When all is said and done, the left finds itself on the wrong side of the Saddam Hussein issue. That’s not quite bad as having been on the wrong side of the Joseph Stalin issue, but it’s close. With time running out, Meyerson tries to salvage the situation by protesting that “if the only factor had been ridding Iraq of its Baathist thugocracy, why, of course, the war merited support.” But there were extenuating circumstances. “Supporting the war also meant supporting the new national doctrine of preventive – that is discretionary – wars. It meant the shredding of the United Nations and NATO and the very idea of international institutions.” And, of course, it meant supporting that liar Bush.
The incoherence of these excuses is manifest. Wars to topple thugocracies will almost always be “discretionary.” Thus, it is sheer posturing for Meyerson to suggest that the war would have merited support if the only issue had been Saddam. He has set up the analysis so that Saddam (and murderous tyrants like him) can never be the only issue, or the dispositive one.
Moreover, to the extent that Meyerson’s concern was with the concept of pre-emptive war, he fails to explain what would have been so difficult about saying, as a handful of leftists did, that he supports ousting Saddam because of the dictator’s deadly practices, but does not support the concept of pre-emptive war. It is simply false for Meyerson to assert that “supporting the war meant supporting the new national doctrine of preventive war.”
Finally, consider Meyerson’s claptrap about the United Nations. The reality is that key members of the U.N. are either borderline thugocracies themselves or have a track record of tolerating such regimes. If Meyerson values deference to an institution that gives such members the veto more highly than he values liberating the victims of a monstrous tyranny, that’s his prerogative. But he should either explain why that choice represents the moral high ground, or admit that he does not occupy that ground.
Towards the end of his piece, Meyerson invokes the memory of Irving Howe and the democratic socialist tradition of opposition to Communist regimes. But the heirs of that honorable tradition are people like Christopher Hitchens, who unequivocally supported the overthrow of the monster Saddam, not those like Meyerson who found excuses for not acting, and always will.
