The Crime of Complacency

Tony Blankley said this today on Crossfire:

Every time we have a discussion with people who are against the war now, and who were against the war then, it’s difficult to ever go beyond point A. The fact is the world remains in danger from rogue dictators who may come into posession of weapons of mass destruction and may pass them to terrorists.

That is the fundamental truth of our time. We can haggle over words, but if we don’t deal with that fact, millions of Americans and Europeans are going to be killed.

And I don’t know why the debate never addresses how do we deal with that fact. All the demonstrators don’t have a solution, they don’t even recognize it as a problem, and you and I could die tomorrow because of it.

Damn, he read my mind. I live in a college town with no shortage of anti-war liberals. Well before the war began, I asked some questions of the doves both in person and online, then ranted when I couldn’t get anyone to answer.

Look, I supported the war against Saddam Hussein (despite misgivings that were later borne out) because I felt we had to confront the problem of Iraq sooner or later. I felt that Hussein’s cruelty, coupled with his broadly acknowledged pursuit of WMDs, created a sore that we could not allow to fester indefinitely.

The fact remains that anti-war liberals had no plan to deal with Saddam Hussein. There was nothing — not his unimaginable cruelty, nor the long-term threat he posed to the stability of the region — that would convince them that Bush was right to force the world to do something about him.

To focus solely on the Iraq invasion, I think, would be tactical and intellectually narrow. But when it came to offering ideas on how to better combat threats to our national security, people I previously respected became willfully obtuse, focusing on the administration’s poorly articulated case for war as an excuse not to think for themselves. Most disturbingly, they seemed blinded by Bush-hatred, and hostile to the suggestion that there even was a looming threat posed by proliferating WMD and the emergence of new nuclear powers.

It was in the run-up to the Iraq war that I learned something about the previously benign ultra-left: They are dangerously intransigent, intellectually dishonest, and as poisonous to the national dialogue as the conservatives who dogged Bill Clinton. A country in which their kind is in power is not one that I would want to live in.