JONATHAN SCHELL’S PIECE, which I mentioned earlier, is extra-dumb on second reading. Get this bit:

Vietnam provides an example. Vietnam today enjoys the self-determination it battled to achieve for so long; but it has not become a democracy.

“Self-determination?” Well, after a fashion. It used to be a Soviet client state — but now there’s no Soviet Union, thanks to American cold warriors! Somehow I doubt that this is what Schell means, though.

So what does “self-determination” mean to Schell? It isn’t “determination by the Vietnamese people,” since he admits Vietnam isn’t a democracy. In fact, it’s a place that continues to persecute dissidents, though to no great cries of outrage from the left:

2003-09-11 / Associated Press /
Three relatives of dissident Catholic priest Thadeus Nguyen Van Ly appeared in a Ho Chi Minh City court yesterday to face charges of “abusing democratic freedoms,” a court official said.

Nguyen Thi Hoa, 44, and her brothers, Nguyen Vu Viet, 28, and Nguyen Truc Cuong, 36, were charged with “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state,” the court official said on condition of anonymity.

So it’s self-determination if you’re run as a police state by the remnants of a former client regime, under the name of a failed foreign ideology? I guess to Schell, it is.

Meanwhile, though only sort of related to Schell, here’s something that Bill Whittle posted in his own comments section:

Criticising the President does not make you, automatically, a defeatist and self-hater. I’m sorry if I gave that impression. Nevertheless, there are indeed armies of defeatists and self-haters out there, and criticising the record of the administration since 9/11/01 has been a full-time job for them. Those are the people I was referring to.

The point is simply this: in the days and weeks after 9/11, many people counseled sanctions, resolutions, and the whole tired bag of appeasement. This President rejected that option, and has been roundly and severely criticised for going after not only the terrorists, but the nations that breed and harbor them.

Disagreements about strategy or approach are one thing. But as soon as you start the “we had it coming,” or the “Bush=Hitler” stuff, you’ve put yourself in a different camp entirely. Still, I want to associate myself completely with this statement. The mere fact that everyone who is anti-American criticizes the war doesn’t mean that everyone who criticizes the war is anti-American. But there are definitely quite a few people out there who, to paraphrase Dylan, would rather see us paralyzed.