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Podhoretz the epitome
Take every single pro-Bush cliché about how we’re winning the war in Iraq that I’ve been anatomizing at this website for the last two and a half years, pack them into a 7,000 word article, ratchet up the self-righteousness and triumphalism and aggression to the nth degree, and you’ve got Norman Podhoretz’s article in the January Commentary, “The Panic over Iraq.” Podhoretz has a novel thesis that encapsulates, and carries to a new level, the Bushites’ desperate triumphalism. The reason for the left’s increasing attacks lately on the war, Podhoretz argues, is not that the war is going badly, but that … it’s going so well. The left is attacking the war so vociferously because they know it’s succeeding, and if it succeeds, Bush would succeed, and the left would lose. Not to deny that the left often acts on precisely such motives, but how do we know the war is succeeding? Well (and here comes the litany), there are the elections, there’s all that good news from inside Iraq which the media keeps covering up, there’s the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon, there are the contested elections in Egypt (which, by the way, the Muslim Brotherhood is dominating), there’s …
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