Why Democrats want to lose the war

Andrew McCarthy looks at Party of Defeat.

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As David Horowitz and Ben Johnson recount in their bracing new book, Party of Defeat, Democrats and their favorite Nobel laureates (Jimmy Carter having earned that distinction before Gore) certainly have been prepared to go to the limit on Iraq — that is, the outer limit of shame, and shamelessness.

By the next year, before a throng of MoveOn.org activists, an audience today’s predominantly antiwar Democrats are more comfortable addressing, Gore railed that President Bush had “engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology” — knowing full well, the authors observe, that the term is resonant of fascism, Nazism and Communism. Indeed, Gore’s volte face ultimately included the assertion that “[h]istory will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.”

This from the second-highest official of an administration which had repeatedly saber-rattled and fired missiles at Iraq — the same Clinton administration which had made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. The administration whose top national-security officials told the 9/11 Commission as late as in 2004 — that is, even as Gore’s 180-degree turn was in mid-swirl — that its 1998 bombing of the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was the right thing to do: After all, reliable intelligence showed the plant was a chemical-weapons venture jointly run by Sudan, Iraq, and al-Qaeda.

So why the treacherous flip-flop? In an ad horrendum indictment that piles fact onto sordid fact, Messrs. Horowitz and Johnson convincingly demonstrate that the modern Democrat leadership is singularly dedicated to delegitimizing and thus destroying the Bush presidency. Having calculated this political strategy, they are heedless of the fact that their tireless opposition, distortion, and propaganda can only lead to the defeat of the United States in what the authors aptly call the war with Islamofascism. In fact, many in the hard Left desire just that outcome. With both Bush and the America that he symbolizes as their targets, no betrayal is off the table.

David Horowitz, of course, is among the most gifted and consequential writers in the conservative movement — particularly insightful when diagnosing the Left’s bare-knuckles, will-to-power arsenal because he came of age in the radical orb. Ben Johnson is the managing editor of the feisty Frontpage Magazine, which is published online daily by Horowitz’s Freedom Center. In Party of Defeat, they recount “unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress.” Describing and documenting the thrall in which the radical Left now holds the Democratic Party, the authors forcefully argue that the resulting “house divided” may lack the unity of national purpose necessary to defeat the perilous threat of jihadism.

The descent of a great political party — one whose determined patriotism was critical to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — has been as predictable as it is disheartening. Many of today’s prominent Leftists were, in the sixties and seventies, heavily influenced by Soviet practices. The authors note that Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet intelligence official to defect to the West, has explained that “[s]owing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks” of his office. A president cannot rally the public to any great national cause if he becomes the object of distrust and ridicule. Propaganda campaigns toward that end were a Soviet priority.

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... the objection to force is primarily to its employment in the service of American national interests. Clinton, the most instinctively anti-military of presidents, routinely dispatched the American armed forces to carry out this or that “humanitarian” mission — even as he delegated to Gore the task of gutting our defense and intelligence services under the guise of “reinventing government.” Beyond this internationalism, the Left’s program, reaffirming the McGovern/Carter tradition, is that American national interests must be subordinated because America is the problem in the world, the “imperial oppressor of the weak and the poor.” Thus, it follows, the just solution to global conflict is to appease America’s enemies since surely they must have a point.

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In sum, the relentless assault on the justness of the cause and the honor with which it has been pursued, coupled with the remorseless determination to suppress any shred of positive news — the wild success of the surge, the rout of al-Qaeda (that would be the al-Qaeda Nancy Pelosi insists was never in Iraq before and would voluntarily leave if our forces did), the overriding reality that 26 million trapped in a hopeless, torturous dictatorship have been given the opportunity to live free — forms, according to the authors, a recipe for only one outcome: Defeat.

Defeat, of course, could also be framed as “victory” of a different kind. The fifth column operatives working toward America’s failure in Iraq seek not only to wrest power from Republicans — whom they limn as a threat markedly greater than radical Islam. They seek to wield power in a direction that is post-American. They are offended not merely by the national interests but by the very idea of America — free, self-determining, exceptional, and self-assured. That America denies their post-sovereign vision just as it thwarts bin Laden’s global caliphate.

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There is more. I quibble with the authors on only one point. I think the left does want to discredit the use of force so that they can use it as an excuse for opposing it in the future. They have a fundamental misunderstanding of counterinsurgency warfare that permeates their thinking.

To the left no one can defeat an insurgency. They think the counter insurgents are automatically destined to lose, and the only way to defeat them is through genocide. The opposite is the case. Historically insurgents lose 90 percent of the time, and as the surge has pointed out there are human ways to defeat one by doing the opposite of what the left suggest is required. By protecting the people they help us defeat the insurgents in Iraq and dramatically lowered the blood shed.