WILLIAM SJOSTROM reports that traditionally anti-American columnist Julie Burchill has decided to weigh in in favor of war with Iraq — and in The Guardian, no less. Excerpt:
The new enemies of America, and of the west in general, believe that these countries promote too much autonomy, freedom and justice. They are the opposite of socialism even more than they are the opposite of capitalism. They are against light, love, life – and to attempt to pass them the baton of enlightenment borne by the likes of Mandela and Guevara is woefully to misunderstand the nature and desires of what Christopher Hitchens (a life-long man of the left) described as “Islamo-fascism”.
When you look back at the common sense and progressiveness of arguments against American intervention in Vietnam, Chile and the like, you can’t help but be struck by the sheer befuddled babyishness of the pro-Saddam apologists.
She then proceeds to demolish the standard lefty arguments against war (“it’s all about oil,” etc.). As Sjostrom notes: “This is simply a massive admission from a figure on the British left. For Americans, imagine if Ramsey Clark admitted that the war might be a good idea.”
UPDATE: Then there’s this, in today’s Observer:
Bosnia and Rwanda made the case for action, because inaction was far worse and its consequences were morally intolerable. In the former, the West (rarely acting in concert) took the course of diplomacy backed up by the incredible threat of mild force. The Yugoslavian situation was deemed to be too complicated and too dangerous to resolve by firm action. Didn’t they all just enjoy killing each other?
There were sanctions, international mediations, peace brokers shuttled hither and yon arranging ceasefires that were broken, usually by the Bosnian Serbs. The United Nations Security Council declared six safe areas for Bosnian Muslims to be protected by lightly equipped UN troops. One of these was Srebrenica.
On 11 July 1995, almost in slow motion, we watched the Serbs enter the safe haven, disarm the Dutch protectors and separate the men and boys from women and small children. And as I saw General Ratko Mladic pacifying a crying Muslim woman, I think I knew, as he certainly did, what was going to happen to her husband or son.
A year earlier, on another continent, we had again looked on while one of the peoples of a sovereign nation, Rwanda, slaughtered another in their hundreds of thousands. Once more, a small UN force was brushed aside in the early stages. Intervention was never seriously considered.
If leaders must take responsibility for these terrible failures, then so must those who always urge inaction. Over Bosnia, Kosovo and over Afghanistan, voices on both the Left and Right have been consistently raised to object to the use of force. Where these voices have belonged to pacifists, they have my respect, but most often they have belonged to the purely selfish, the pathologically timid, or to those who somehow believed that however bad things were in Country X, the Americans were always worse.
It may be too much to hope for, but I think the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the anti-American left is beginning to sink in.