Dividing the right from the smug

Janet Daley:

It is impossible to foresee how the execution of Saddam will divide Iraq. What is much more predictable is the way it will divide opinion here and in the United States. On the broadcasting media yesterday, the America-is-always-wrong brigade was in full flood within an hour of the verdict. The phrase "kangaroo court" was reverberating through the studios – generally mouthed by the very people who had been insisting from the moment of Saddam's capture that he be tried by Iraq itself and not by an international tribunal meting out "victor's justice". (I seem to recall the Today programme devoting hours to the subject of whether the Butcher of Baghdad could possibly get a fair trial under any proceeding organised by the US.)

So perhaps we could just take the next chapter as read. Those who have always supported the removal of Saddam will see this verdict as a vindication: condemnation of his crimes by his own compatriots and an appropriate judicial end to a homicidal tyranny. The various strands of opposition to his removal – anti-war in general, anti-this-war in particular, anti-American, anti-Israel, not to mention the cynical we-can-do-business-with-this-guy mentality of the Europeans – will use it, and its consequences, as more evidence for their case that we should have left Iraq alone.

But while we all worry about whether Iraqi democracy is salvageable, it might be worth asking precisely what is happening to our own idea of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" as it is refracted through this foreign crisis. I was in the US last week when John Kerry's remarks about the intellectual calibre of American military personnel hit the fan. The TV news channels played and re-played his description of the US forces in Iraq as an army of thicko no-hopers. The fact that he uttered it so smugly and unselfconsciously added to the stupendous effect. He had simply forgotten himself and spoken as he would among friends. He had no sense that this was an offensive thing to say: in the circles in which he travels, it is the conventional wisdom.

That insouciance was a gift to the Republicans. What the Kerry gaffe did was to make clear the gap that now exists in American politics between the great mass of American popular opinion – for whom soldiers, especially when they are risking their lives in battle, are heroic figures – and the liberal elite for whom military action is a dirty, downmarket game.

So when exactly did snobbery become the province of the Left? In Britain and in the United States, it used to be axiomatic that the wealthy, privileged de haut en bas voices belonged to those on the Right of centre. They may have been paternalistic and charitable (at least as a social hobby) but they were comfortable with their superiority and unencumbered by any sense that their advantages were unjust.

Now all the condescension – all the snide hauteur about common folk and their vulgar prejudices – comes from the Left-liberal corner. It is the views of the common man – caricatured as the politics of the trailer park in the US, and of white-van man in Britain – that are the object of contempt in right-thinking (which is to say, Left-thinking), socially enlightened circles....

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The argument behind the argument will go on there as it goes on here: do we want government by the people or only by the right sort of people?...

The liberal conceit is that if you were really smart you would agree with them on the issues. If you do not you are stupid or incapable of rational thought. John Kerry just reflects what he has been reading on Daily Kos, and his insult laced response to the criticism is also reflected of what passes for logical argument on the left side of the blogsphere.

Michael Barone also discusses the Democrat's stuck in the 60's problem. They learned all the wrong lessens from the war in Vietnam and are determined to apply the wrong lessens to all conflicts including the one in Iraq. Don't be fooled into thinking it is just about Iraq. If we were not fighting in Iraq, the Democrats would be doing the same thing with the war in Afghanistan.