It isn't that bad, really

A Manifesto From the Left Too Sensible to Ignore

By ROGER COHEN
International Herald Tribune
Published: December 30, 2006

NEW YORK This has been a bleak year for nuanced thinking. President George W. Bush likes to speak in certainties; contrition and compromise are not his thing. Among hyperventilating left-liberals, hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window. The result is a mindless cacophony.

Bush, even after the thumping of the Republicans in November, equates criticism of the war in Iraq with defeatist weakness. Much of the left, in both Europe and the United States, is so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases, it seems to have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein.

There appears to be little hope that Bush will ever abandon his with-us-or-against-us take on the post-9/11 world. Division is the president's adrenalin; he abhors shades of gray. Nor does it seem likely that the America-hating, over-the-top ranting of the left - the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda - will abate during the Bush presidency.

This state of affairs is grave. The threat posed by Islamic fanaticism, inside and outside Iraq, requires the lucid analysis and informed disagreement of civilized minds. Bush's certainties are dangerous. But so is the moral equivalency of the left, the kind that during the Cold War could not see the crimes of communism, and now seems ready to equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship.

This kind of sad apologia fools no one outside Fox News and Washington. Gitmo is called a gulag because it is one. They hold children in custody. If that isn't Stalinesque, what is?

Every lemming on the right claims any opposition to Bush is driven by hatred. Really? Someone should ask Charles Swannick if he hates Bush. What Cohen doesn't get is that only a few pundits like him still support our colonial adventure in Iraq. Everyone else sees what a failure it is and wants it to end.

Then he brings up the Euton Manifesto, some bullshit by liberal and not so liberal hawks about defending our colonial war.

Roger, here's reality.

Americans avoid enlisting to fight in Bush's war. We're taking criminals and 40 year olds to fight because the best and brightest of America would rather work in Wal Mart than face multiple tours in Iraq.

Not one of your friends or your kids friends has one person they know serving in combat overseas. This is all abstraction to you.

But understand this: the American people have tired of your war and the cost of it. They want it to end. You and a bunch of warmongers won't change that.