As a conservative, “W” was never my guy. I cautioned friends gleeful about the presumed end of the Clintons in 2000 that the Bush people were not “us,” but Republican regulars. These are the types who regularly give both their party and conservatism a bad name. I’ve maintained for eight years that this Bush was no one to get excited about, for or against. He’s up to his armpits in his father’s wing of his party, a sort of postwar status-quo liberal club Republicanism. The rest is a mix of Texas politics with some room made for sound conservatism.

Conservatives fought for decades to fend off movement by the federal government into education, and “W” succeeded, where the opposition failed, in bringing us “no child left behind,” an inroad which with characteristic gratitude Democrats ridiculed and reviled, while looking for ways to use. I confess to finding Rumsfeld’s press conferences entertaining, and being impressed with Condi Rice’s brain, though her orientation is not mine. Her involvement in Bush Sr.’s policies dealing with the breakup of the Soviet bloc, especially her negotiation of the end of the Warsaw Pact, was impressive work, but left the door open for Clinton’s use of $1 billion per year to shore up Russia, and the Primakov-Putin gang’s power plays there. No desire was evident to drive a stake through the heart of dictatorship.

Bush has had his moments. He and John Bolton, as people who follow such things know, did more for Africa than all previous administrations combined.

This said, I never enjoyed feeling forced to defend “W.” I did so because the hysterical hyperbole surrounding him was so obviously of partisan origin. It’s always astonishing what people, especially educated ones, will go for. There is a basic ploy built into human nature, that when the ego is stroked, as implying that one will “know better” or be nicer than others if one takes a certain position, one often takes that position.

Anti-war politics during the Iraq intervention of the last five years, as well as during our southeast Asian involvement, were pushed along to a large extent by people who expressly did not wish for our success. The intense accusatory nature of such politics made war more difficult and dangerous for our troops and allies, by increasing the perception of division and weakness by opponents. Successful strategies were formed this way and used against us and our allies. This meant nothing but success to hardline leaders of “peace” movements. The American left now professes great piety about supporting the Afghan war, in contrast of course with Iraq. The left in Europe and Canada, however, campaigns as hard against their countries’ Afghan involvements as the American left does about Iraq.

As our Afghan efforts solidified, the decision was made to follow this fluid cross-border war into Iraq. Much was made over the fact that Saddam’s regime had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. I never heard anyone say it did. I had personally seen Syria as a priority, the Assad regime being responsible for decades of bombing attacks against American targets, along with war, terror, and instability in the region.

Saddam did have much to recommend him as target for take down, though. Much went on in Iraq after the 1990 gulf war defeat and treaty. A laundry list of violations of that treaty let American political parties know we were headed back there sooner or later. Bill Clinton’s use of B-52 and cruise missile raids against Iraqi targets even seemed like a stall. Prominent Democratic figures talked about getting tough with Saddam in fact, right up until Bush dropped the hammer in 2003. Saddam had also been pushing in the post 1990 period to join the terror community, this being a sure route to increased stature in the Middle East. He hosted officials from various terror groups and even built training camps for them, one complete with an airliner fuselage. He instructed his own officials not to get personally involved with these future rivals, his experience alas being only in terrorizing Iraqis.

These groups welcomed his support, if not necessarily him. We all know now that Saddam’s beloved WMD programs were inactive, but the Iraq Study Group did find key personnel and materials salted away around the country in related work.

There were plenty of reasons to take out Saddam’s rule. After, while he and his were hiding, there was a gratifying story that came a week before my birthday. Saddam’s sons had been rolled up, when their latest host became their last host by walking to the nearest American checkpoint. It seems he’d tired of Qusay and Uday hitting his wife.

When we hear stories about a Sunni group stopping a school van and shooting girls for wearing gym shorts, or Iranian enforcers wiping makeup off a woman with a cloth hiding a razor, we know we’re fighting the right guys. Terror campaigns have been waged first and predominantly against the most vulnerable people and the poorest nations.

The real success in the Iraq strategy has been that our opponents have placed so high a priority on opposing us there, and we have neutralized them in droves, even before the surge. Mideast pundit Amir Taheri chronicled the waves made throughout the region and Islamic world during stages of democratization in Iraq. Success continues.

In the last years of the Viet Nam war, handfuls of antiwar leaders professed Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and anarchism, and no one paid attention, yet these organizers rallied tens of thousands into often violent street events. What do we learn about ourselves in this? Among other things, no one is more naïve about politics than intellectuals, and no one is more naïve about the left than liberals.

We’ve grown a huge intellectual class which is permanently opposed to all that America does in her defense or interests. This is the direct result of the influence of aforementioned hardliners, who set out to intimidate responsible liberalism, and displace it. They succeeded. Left-wing anticommunism was soon in disrepute in the 1970s. Hubert Humphrey was hounded ’til his dying day by pygmies who hadn’t stuck their necks out for civil rights when it counted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as he had. When he announced he had cancer, increasingly prominent “new left” dwarves said that he should’ve taken that opportunity to make an environmental statement.

After the mid 1960s everyone was on board for civil rights, and the cause was helping expand political empires. Where was the curiosity and skepticism of intellectuals during the decades when the Democratic Party was champion of civil rights while being the exclusive party of the Klan? In big cities, many ethnic groups vying for power were represented by the same party. Public sector labor and management had commissarial rank in the same party, which also handed cities like Newark, New Orleans, and Niagara Falls to the Mob. Intellectuals remained on board.

One tangible effect when society mass-produces intellectuals is the proliferation of platitudes on cars. Ordinary folk sport funny bumper stickers, but the enlightened wear their feelings there now, instead of on their sleeves.

There’s little chance the current intellectuals will realize as a group that their view of their own society’s faults is disproportional and dysfunctional, and they do base so much on this view. It’s been said that liberals enjoy disruption, but people like Humphrey or David Susskind lacked the ill-will of a Saul Alinsky, Angela Davis, or worse.

If contemporary intellectuals learned to stop rationalizing about the current crop of wolves at the door, they might see more worth in their own culture. We might then see responsible liberals on the scene again, which we need. The achievements and contributions to the culture by earlier generations of intellectuals were so much greater than anything we’ve seen in decades.

Remember Toynbee saying that civilizations die by suicide? With Western culture dispensed by dispirited cynics, we’ve been off to a flying start.

Dan Hoffman
Buffalo

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