Gary Farber writes about the conflict with which those of us from the Left are grappling. He talks about the 1930s Left who formed the Abraham Lincoln brigades to fight Franco, and the 1960s Left who mobilized to stop a war. We’ve remained in the mode of the 1960s: assuming wars and interventions are wrong. Gary, PNH, and Christopher Hitchens (who have talked about the example of taking arms against authoritarians) are working on cynical folks such as me, who grew up with one low-intensity war after another, and learned that Type II failures from assuming the Government was dissembling were infrequent, and adopted a rule of maximal cynicism.
So it’s hard to change those ways of thinking, even when there is a whole world out there who would kill us given the chance. So yes, the Left needs to changing its thinking on the use of force, but we need a Government that doesn’t lie, and is willing to take the hard road of supporting Democracy abroad instead of cutting short term deals with thugs.
One positive signal in this direction would be Bush reading the Riot Act to the Saudis over their support of terror, and their official policy of anti-Semitism.
