Candidate Obama says he is in favor of withdrawal from Iraq in spite of the consequences although he recently said he would want to keep a “strike force” ready, presumably to reinvade if necessary. The theoretical basis for this sort of thing seems to be coming from the leftist blogosphere and an entire generation of isolationists and appeasers. A common theme is hatred of “neocons.”
International Herald Tribune columnist Roger Cohen, for instance, notes that “neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States ‘on the right side of history.’
The theory seems to be proclaimed in a book by Matt Yglesias. The similarity to the 1930s is striking.
The long tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism thus appears to have come to an end, at least in mainstream political rhetoric. What about human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch? Largely staffed by leftists, these days they escape the neoconservative charge because they generally presume moral equivalence between democracies and anti-American thuggocracies. Amnesty, for instance, has referred to Guantánamo as a “gulag” and Human Rights Watch has issued more press releases about the lack of gay rights in the United States than any other country on earth.
Iran, of course “has no gays” so it is not a problem there. Only here.
We’ll see how it plays out over the next six months. If the American people are ready to retreat from the world, Obama will be the next president.
It’s not rocket science. Giving bullies what they want does NOT make them reasonable. That is true from the playground all the way up to geopolitics. Giving bullies what they want engenders contempt for the other side, and a push for still more concessions.
Compromise is another matter. But bullies—either on the micro or macro scale—seem to have unusual views of the definition of that word.