A conservative contact whose mailing list I happen to be on sent me this piece by John Leo at Real Clear Politics, in which Democrats are generally slandered as unpatriotic Islamic extremism appeasers. After this smackdown, I don't think I'll be on the mailing list any more.

Smackdown below.

This continuous "liberals are anti-American" drivel is the worst form of slanderous, fearmongering stupidity. Not that I'm surprised, coming from Real Clear Politics. "Liberals live like internal aliens and have a hard time connecting emotionally with 9/11"? What the hell is that? Clearly, whoever wrote that has never talked to a single liberal, a single Democrat, in his entire life, despite his claim to be a leftist intellectual--or the claim of the author that said person is a leftist intellectual. And furthermore, I guess that means that the 48% of this nation that voted for Kerry is completely bankrupt with regard to patriotism. Maybe we'll all root for China in the 2008 olympics. We'll probably want to see our World Cup team finish last as well. How ever will our country survive if 48% of us don't believe in America? People should be ashamed to further political discourse that dismisses a full half of our country as people who don't believe in America, but hey--that's the right wing for you.

All snark aside, take my case. Or the case of any of my friends at college back in 2001. Yeah, all those people whom this great patriot John Leo would say are representative of the "liberal opinion on campus". A bunch of us got together before school started and discussed whether we should join the military so we could take the fight back to Afghanistan. Most of us ended up decided to continue our educations and said that we would re-evaluate serving upon our graduation; but one of us signed up with the Marines.

Why did we do this? Because we were so angry, so enraged at what happened, that we wanted to personally participate in the destruction of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime. My brother and I had actually advocated for an invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11, given their atrocious abuses of human rights as well as their support of Osama bin Laden. The Bush administration actually had plans for an invasion of Afghanistan as well, but their reasoning was different: you see, the Taliban regime had visited Unocal's headquarters in Houston to discuss building a natural gas pipeline. Yes, the Taliban--the supporters of Osama bin Laden--got a corporate-paid. tour of NASA and the rest of Houston in 1998. Well, unfortunately for Unocal, the Taliban had gotten so bad in early 2001--after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas and the execution of women for not wearing burqas--that Unocal decided it would be bad public relations to do business with the Taliban, and ended the pipeline deal. Not surprisingly, plans were drawn up to do regime change in Afghanistan. And also not surprisingly, Hamid Karzai, the U.S. backed president of Afghanistan, used to be a lobbyist for and advisor to--you guessed it--Unocal. Isn't it funny how that all works out?

But as it turns out, my brother and I did not sign up for the military after graduation. Why not? Well, we graduated in June 2003--a mere two months after Bush had sent his occupying force into Iraq. And I can tell you that my brother and I decided that there was no way in hell we were going to risk dying fighting a nation that hadn't attacked us when Osama bin Laden and Omar were still at large, with the Taliban still a force in Afghanistan. Bush said that he wasn't concerned about Bin Laden--that's easy to see, the way things turned out. We had decided that we would risk our lives to fight the Taliban--but we wouldn't risk our lives to occupy Iraq.

But that little tidbit about Afghanistan isn't relevant to the larger point Leo is desperate to try to make. Leo is, of course, right about something, but usually when you throw a hundred darts with a blindfold on, you'll score a bulls-eye at least once. There were quite a few pacifists after 9/11 that didn't want to see any invasion of Afghanistan at all. But people like that are rare, despite Leo's attempt to claim that they are the core of the campus-based liberal Democratic ideology. Similarly, there are conservatives who think that it would be acceptable and appropriate to use nuclear weapons to turn Mecca into a giant sheet of glass. However, liberal columnists aren't so stupid--or intentionally misleading--as to claim that such a belief is representative of mainstream conservative ideology.

But let's deal with this "liberals blame America first" mythology once and for all. Of course fighting global jihad is one of our nation's most important priorities--as it ought to be. The question is how you go about dealing with it. The conservative solution to global jihad--at least in theory--is to use our military to play whack-a-mole at an ever increasing rate in the naive belief that there is a finite number of terrorists (by the way, never call them jihadists--the use of that very term gives them legitimacy) and if we just whack faster, the moles will stop showing up. The Democratic idea is to use the military and local and international law enforcement to deal with the moles that pop up, while working to shut the machine off.

Leo dismisses Moveon.org's claim that the U.S. creates monsters, apparently assuming that simply calling such a statement unpatriotic will somehow invalidate the premise of the argument. Unfortunately for Leo, that argument is exactly correct--Osama bin Laden is but one of many extremist totalitarians supported by the U.S. Another prominent one happens to be Saddam Hussein. Manuel Noriega. The Islamic Revolution in Iran was a response to the policies of the rightist Shah, whom we installed at the behest of British Petroleum to replace Mossadegh because they didn't like his populist leanings. The CIA even has a particular term that refers to such events: operatives or governments with our support coming back to bite us. They call it "blowback." And it happens a lot. So maybe the conservative movement should stop accusing us of being unpatriotic when we bring up history, and try learning from it instead. Time was that learning from history was an honored hallmark of conservatism. Now, history is ignored in favor of "the gut."

And to figure out how to shut the machine off, you need to figure out where its power source is. Let's make an analogy. Let's say who smokes a pack a day and gets lung cancer. What do you do? Obviously, you do everything you can to deal with the cancer because it's going to kiill your friend. Your friend will also get sympathy and get-well cards from everyone he knows--including a few people who he's not really on a first-name basis with, and maybe even a few people he's met who dont' really like him. A liberal--concerned for the well-being of his friend--will say, "that's terible that you got cancer. Let's deal with your tumor first and get you through this,, but you know, you really need to stop smoking, and this cancer ought to wake you up to that fact." A conservative would then say, "you see, he's pro-cancer! He blames you! He hates you! He can't emotionally connect with you in your moment of need!" Said conservative will then press for the amputation of your friend's hand on the basis that some unnamed specialists he knows contend that it has traces of pre-cancerous cell membranes.

And that, unfortunately, is the sad nature of the political divide. A conservative will say that it is not legitimate to question whether or not our military, economic and corporate support of abusive totalitarian multi-billionaire regimes contributes to the ire against us. They will say that is it not legitimate to question our CIA-based encouragement of Islamic fundamentalism as a counter to the Soviets during the cold war. Conservatives will say that efforts at energy independence--despite the fact that it would create a whole new stateside energy economy, and it would save us not only money paid to oil regimes, but also save us the money paid out in military security in the Middle East--conservatives will say that liberal efforts at energy independence is a concession to terrorism, as if it were somehow a virtue and not a vice to be so economically intertwined with countries like Saudi Arabia that sponsor terrorism against us.

But it must be legitimate to ask those questions, especially when the answers are so obvious. The same can be said for the rise of socialism in South America. Conservatives everywhere are up in arms about the electoral developments in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and potentially Peru. They worry about an uprising of socialism in South America. And the only thing I can do is chuckle and say back: what did you expect to happen? American business has been exploiting the resources of South and Central America, leaving banana republics in their wake, for the better part of a century, starting with United Fruit--but it has gotten much worse recently. There was a time recently when Bolivians were not allowed to collect their own rainwater because it belonged by contract to Bechtel. All you need to do is read "Globalization and its Discontents" by renowned economist Stiglitz, or "Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man" by Perkins to understand the true nature of what goes on. And in the face of these iniquities, should people really be shocked when a socialist who promises to nationalize industry and stand up to American corporations gains a groundswell of support from the people of his or her country? The shortsightedness of conservative ideology never ceases to amaze.

And now let's move on to Haditha. Leo says that we liberals are taking delight in the Haditha incident. Actually, such a claim is stupid, and misses the point completely about what we liberals actually are saying about Haditha, and Isahaqi, and other such civilian death in Iraq. As a matter of fact, the only people who do rejoice about massacres like this are the right-wing fascists and Christianists at Free Republic and other such sites. Think I'm joking? I'm not. And I've pointed it out before:

http://www.hekebolos.com/2006/03/isahaqi...

What we say about Haditha is the same resigned "I told you so" that we say about so many other pieces of the misguided conservative ideology--namely, that you cannot place soldiers in an urban combat situation when they have received no counter-insurgency training, where they cannot tell friend from foe, where they are sent over for three or four tours of duty because of stop-loss policies, and expect massacres of civilians--children included, not to happen. They will happen. Because that's what happens urban occupation warfare when you're fighting a bunch of guerilla insurgents. We can all be upset when it happens, yes. But we said stuff like this would happen. Bush and Cheney said we'd be received with flowers in the streets. Clearly, we've been proven right for many years now. Incidents like Haditha only prove that our worst fears have been realized. It's the same sense of resigned "I told you so" when a friend is about to do something stupid and you warn him of the consequences. He does it anyway, and suffers the consequences you said would befall him. Does that mean that you rejoice at his fate? No. But maybe he should listen to you a bit more carefully next time.

And finally, let's discuss the fight against global terrorism in broader terms. First of all, I would be interested in seeing the actual results of the post-election poll in question, given the fact that a Center for American Progress poll in March 2004 claimed that only 18% of Americans in general reported that foreign policy issues were the most important thing driving their vote--so clearly, some poll somewhere has some explaining to do. Conservatives like to make the naive assumption that liberals aren't interested in fighting global jihad, and we don't like conservatives because they are interested in fighting global jihad. No, that's not actually the case.

One of the key reasons why we liberals despise Bush and his crew is because he has not done anything to stop global jihad. He has, instead, provided Al-Qaeda with all the legitimacy and justification it needs--both in words and deeds--to continue its "America as anti-Muslim imperialists" propaganda. We despise this administration precisely because of its failure to successfully counteract global jihad. The person responsible for the worst massacre of civilians in American history is still at large, and our President has the temerity to say that he isn't that concerned about him. The occupation of Iraq has fueled fundamentalist sentiment, caused a flare-up in ethnic and religious strife, left Iran as the chief power in the region allied with a Shiite southern Iraq, cost us $550 billion. and has left dead just as many Americans as Sept 11th did--in addition to the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians whose deaths are so routinely celebrated by the participants in right-wing message boards. Statistics compiled by the Department of State report that terrorist activity is at an all-time high. The Taliban are resurgent, and Afghanistan is a narcostate. And Leo has the audacity to critique "liberals" for not being on board with the "war on terror"? Anyone who isn't outraged by these results simply isn't paying attention--or has been brainwashed by conservative definitions of patriotism into thinking that questioning the current policy, no matter how ineffective it may be, is a sign of moral weakness.

And I'm actually being very nice to Bush by giving him the extreme benefit of the doubt in allowing the claim that Iraq was occupied as part of the war on terror, given that a preponderance of evidence--such as PNAC's 1998 letter to Clinton, as well as the comments of Bush when he was governor, and the statements of President Bush and Sec. Def. Rumsfeld--suggest overwhelmingly that an invasion of Iraq had been a policy initiative of the current powerholders for a long time, and they finally got an excuse to do it. But I'll allow the occupation of Iraq to be considered an anti-terrorism campaign for the purposes of this argument.

Final summation: the current response to terrorism by this administration and its corporatist and Christianist allies is an unmitigated failure, and new leadership is needed--and no amount of calling me unpatriotic or un-American--or, in the words of conservative favorite Ann Coulter, "someone who deserves to be killed"--is going to change that one fundamental fact.