Michael J. Totten sets forth “The Liberal Case for Bush:”
Conventional wisdom says Kerry has taken every possible position on the Iraq war. But it’s not true. He hasn’t.
There is one he has ignored all along, the very position he should have championed from the beginning: the liberal case for war, the one that gave Operation Iraqi Freedom its name. Bush makes [democracy] the lynchpin of his foreign policy. Kerry can hardly be bothered to give it lip service.
[Bush] couldn’t have made it more clear when he gave the commencement address at the Air Force Academy in June 2004:
“For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.”
There you have it. This is exactly what liberals have demanded for decades. And now that Bush veers to the left he is jeered by the left for being “reckless,” “extremist,” “imperialist,” and even “fascist.”
That’s precisely the reason some of the left’s most stout-hearted members, most famously Christopher Hitchens himself, ditched their old comrades to forge an alliance with the neoconservative right.
Johann Hari wrote a profile of Christopher Hitchens last month in the U.K. Independent:
[Hitchens told me] “I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzgovinia. . . . I was signing petitions in favor of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there’s Richard Perle. There’s Paul Wolfowitz. . . . These people were saying we had to act.”
So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying — we can’t carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. . .”
[Hitchens] offers an anecdote . . . There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book “Reading Lolita in Tehran” documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs . . . And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? Paul Wolfowitz . . .
[Hitchens] gives an account of how the neocon philosophy affected the course of the Iraq war. “The CIA . . . wanted to keep the Iraqi army together because you never know when you might need a large local army. . . But Wolfowitz and others wanted to disband the Iraqi army, because they didn’t want anybody to even suspect that they wanted to restore military rule.”
He thinks that if this philosophy can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn US power into a revolutionary force.
Anne Lieberman has a good post on Ed Lasky’s “Why American Jews must vote for Bush.”