We’re scared

Victor Davis Hanson thinks it’s time for anti-War Democrats to be honest about their current stance. I agree. As you may recall, I really savagely attacked Democrats who voted for the war and are now trying to leave the troops unfunded and recreate the Vietnam experience both at home and abroad. (Oh, joy! Those were the days.)

Part of my hostility is that I’ve never heard one of these Democrat’s credibly explain his turnabout. They say it’s all about “Bush lied,” except it isn’t. The truth is that “Wilson lied.” And we here that “we didn’t get all the information,” but it isn’t, because many Senators got the same information as Bush. And then there’s the “no WMDs” mantra, as if that was the only reason to go to war, which belies the 22 other reasons Congress carefully detailed. Hanson spells out the truth on the ground at the time:

Most in Congress accepted that Saddam was a genocidal mass murderer. They knew he used his petrodollars to acquire dangerous weapons. And they felt his savagery was intolerable in a post-9/11 world. There was no debate that Saddam gave money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or offered sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal. And few Democrats questioned whether the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam was in Kurdistan.

In other words, Democrats, like most others, wanted Saddam taken out for a variety of reasons beyond fears of WMDs. Moreover, it was the Clinton-appointed CIA director George Tenet who supplied both Democrats and Republicans in Congress with much of the intelligence they would later cite in deciding to attack Saddam.

When both congressional Democrats and Republicans cast their votes to go along with President Bush, they even crafted 23 formal causes for war. So far only the writ concerning the fear of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has in hindsight proven false.

Once historical reality erases the excuses, what you’re left with is the unpalatable Democratic truth: “We’re scared: we’re scared of the jihadists, and we’re scared of European disdain, and we’re especially scared of our more extreme base.” Or, as Hanson more eloquently puts it:

So why not come clean about their changes of heart?

Many Democrats apparently think that claiming they were victimized by Bush and the neocons is more palatable than confessing to their own demoralization with the news from the front.

Others may fear that admitting publicly that a disheartened America should not or cannot finish a conflict would send a dangerous message to our enemies. So while these Democrats accuse President Bush of being hardheaded and unwavering on Iraq, they are still afraid that their own mea culpas would send an equally dangerous message of inconsistency abroad.

Democrats need to admit the truth: that removing a dangerous Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in his place seemed a good idea to them in 2003-4 when the cost appeared tolerable. Now, in 2007, with over 3,000 American lives lost in Iraq, they feel differently.

In other words, Democrats could argue that somewhere along the line — whether it was after Fallujah or the start of sectarian Sunni-Shiite violence — they either lost confidence in the very ability of the United States to stabilize Iraq or felt that, even if we could, it was no longer worth the tab in American blood and treasure.

I like Hanson’s demand for ideological honesty.  I don’t see it happening, though, when Congress people always have the sheltering arms of an ideologically complicit media within which to hide.