IT’S understandable that politicians, especially Democratic politicians, might have been sitting on the fence about the looming war with Iraq. After all, they have to deal with a voting base on the Left that seems tragically, defiantly and bizarrely unwilling to comprehend that militant Islam might be more threatening to the United States than their fellow American, George W. Bush.
Over the next week or so, many of those fence-sitters will climb down and join the president and the majority of the American people in full-throated support of the war. It’s already begun. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein announced that Colin Powell’s speech on Wednesday changed her mind. Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said that Powell’s case amounted to a conviction in a criminal trial. And there will only be more to come.
But intellectuals and members of the chattering classes are not politicians. We’re paid to express our opinions without fear or favor. Fence-sitting is an option, certainly, but it’s an option of the cowardly.
President Bush’s tough and frightening speech yesterday afternoon proves that there is no real distance and no difference between the president and his secretary of state. Which is what everyone should have understood for months now.
Many hawks are inclined to celebrate the fact that yesterday some liberal columnists and editorialists announced themselves convinced by Colin Powell’s speech – Mary McGrory in the Washington Post most directly, the New York Times editorial page a little more indirectly.
The Times wrote, “Mr. Powell’s presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime. It may not have produced a ‘smoking gun,’ but it left little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.”
McGrory wrote she “heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought . . . Colin Powell has convinced me that [war] might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.”
“Three cheers for McGrory,” Andrew Sullivan said yesterday on his Web site.
I understand the impulse to cheer. But McGrory and her ilk don’t deserve it. They deserve raspberries, not cheers. They deserve ridicule, not praise. We hawks shouldn’t feel vindicated by their conversion. Rather, they should feel embarrassed by how long it took them and how patently silly the cause of their conversion is.
A single speech by Powell made all the difference? Whom are they kidding? That would be acceptable for a regular citizen who doesn’t read four or five newspapers a day, who doesn’t attend panel discussions on world topics and who doesn’t make judgments on matters of national import for a living.
Can the editorialists of The New York Times really expect the world to swallow the contention that until Colin Powell spoke, there was no evidence of Iraq’s defiance of U.N. resolutions? That there has been no ready evidence of its program to make and hide weapons of mass destruction?
Every interpretation of the data offered by Colin Powell is a confirmation of the arguments the hawks have been making for more than a year. Much of the information was new. The truth about Saddam Hussein isn’t new at all.
In American political terms, the only really new thing is that Colin Powell has emerged as the voice of gathering war when for a year we were told he had been serving as the voice of diplomatic restraint. He was supposedly, the “liberal” in the administration.
So, in essence, liberals in the media are using a liberal fig leaf. Because of a contempt or hatred for George W. Bush that is nothing short of demented, they simply refuse to believe the truth when he speaks it.
So they wait for Colin Powell to speak it, at which point they can use his words as a fig leaf and give in without looking like they are in agreement with President Bush.
This is intellectual dishonesty of the highest (or lowest) order.
Politicians practice intellectual dishonesty all the time because they have a higher duty: They must represent the views of their constituents. And they have a practical duty as well: They must not alienate their voting base, even when they disagree with it.
Columnists and editorialists have no excuse for intellectual dishonesty, and they should be held to account for it when they are guilty of it.