A bit more on the stabbing in the back…
By What’s most pathetic about the Goldstein and Hanson pieces is the predicable transparency of the arguments. I am more disappointed in Goldstein than Hanson; “Victor Davis Hanson”, “transparent”, “predictable”, “asinine”, and “puerile” are more or less synonyms in my book. This is a line of attack that has been in preparation since 2002, and that we have expected for nearly as long. If this war went south, everyone knew that the damn dirty liberal hippies would be to blame, just like they were in Vietnam. That the conservative account of Vietnam bears no resemblance to the actual history of that conflict is irrelevant; blaming the critics of a war for its failure has been a remarkably successful political strategy for the right wing, and not just in the United States.
People like Buckley make this strategy a little bit more difficult to execute, because they force Goldstein and company to distinguish between good, “loyal” critics and bad, “disloyal” critics. Nevertheless, the chutzpah surrounding this effort really is astounding. In advance, they manage to have terrified Democrats from Peter Beinart to Hillary Clinton into acquiesence with a manifestly absurd war. Everyone knew this was coming, and they still expect it to work. It’s remarkable, really.
I guess the next question is whether they can actually pull it off. I’m mildly optimistic. A fair portion of America did manage to forget the creeping ineptitude of the Vietnam War in time, but I don’t see it happening as readily in this case. For one, the culture war does not loom as large now as it did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Opposition to this war is personified not in some anonymous, doobie smoking hippie, but (at worst) in people like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore. Conservatives have done their very best to discredit Sheehan and Moore, but they can’t fundamentally transform them into something alien. Moore and Sheehan look like the rest of us; indeed, they look almost like proto-typical Americans. It will be harded to create the impression that anti-war forces are somehow alien and un-American when they very much resemble ordinary Americans.
…more from Glenn Greenwald.