Neocons in despair that public has rejected their fantasy war

Reading pro-Bush bloggers like Roger I. Simon, who was approvingly quoted at Powerline, I feel a kind of awe at the sheer unchanging cluelessness of pro-Bush Republicans.

Simon writes:

[T]he Republican defeat last week was a message of weakness to our enemies. Only the truth is at this moment we are weak. We are a divided country unwilling to wage war against Islamic fascism.

I ask for the thousandth time: what war against Islamic fascism? Does he mean Bush’s four-year-long, uh, holding action in Iraq aimed at, uh, turning the fight over to the Iraqi security forces so that they could, uh, continue the same, uh, holding action? If so, Simon supports this fantastical unreal exercise, dubbing it a “war on Islamic fascism,” and he’s discouraged that the American people do not support this bloody fantasy. Yes, I agree our presence there serves to prevent the disaster of “Islamic fascists” taking over Iraq, but that is not the same as “waging war against Islamic fascism.” Implicit in war is the intent to defeat one’s enemies. We have no such intent in Iraq, therefore it is incorrect to say we are waging war against them.

Maybe if Simon and his fellow Republican patriots supported a real war, a war visibly directed at protecting America and the West from Islam, instead of supporting a fantastical exercise to “spread democracy” in Iraq, a police action hyped as a global crusade to destroy evil, they would get more support from the American people and they wouldn’t feel so discouraged?

Among those discouraged by the American voters’ rejection of a failed and incoherent policy is Mark Steyn, whose column in the Chicago Sun-Times is a compendium of his own delusory thinking. Unintentionally revealing where his true allegiances lie, Steyn, who constantly makes jokes about what he touts as the inevitable Islamization of Europe, is deadly grim and serious about the American voters’ lack of guts and patience to stay the course with Bush’s unworkable Iraq policy, a failure of will he sees as signalling the irreversible decline of America. I will have more to say about this piece, and about the L-dotters’ response to it.

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N. writes:

I have read Simon’s site a few times at the urging of friends. He’s a Hollywood liberal, who has drawn a line in the sand kinda sorta, after a long life of crossing other people’s lines in the sand.

He still seems to have a romantic sort of soft spot for “The Revo” in a ‘68 sort of way. His blind spots to the issues of culture, perhaps due to his own association with that powerful engine of cultural degradation and filth that his paycheck comes from, make him pretty useless on most issues. I quit reading him, although fans of Little Green Footballs often quote him with approval.

This points to a larger problem. On the one hand, it’s good to have as many allies in a conflict as possible. On the other hand, if one has some fundamental principles that cannot be given up, for any reason—for example, an opposition to gun control, or support for free speech—then in the long run, there comes a day when “allies” like Roger Simon wind up on the opposite side of a critical issue. Then there comes this awful awakening, when the both of you realize how alien the other is. And therein lies the problem; ultimately, Simon remains a liberal, and thus self-alienated from the Western civilization he claims to wish to defend. IMO many of these liberal “defenders” of Western Civ are really defenders of the movies they like to watch, restaurants they like to eat at, books they want to read, and their own skins. It’s not the overarching structure of the Western canon they defend, it’s their own selves, friends and personal likes. Which is better than nothing, but it means they cannot be relied upon in too many circumstances.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 13, 2006 11:15 AM | Send