Why Do I Keep Doing This?

Richard Cohen is still pissy:

The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations. I can appreciate some of it. Institution after institution failed America -- the presidency, Congress and the press. They all endorsed a war to rid Iraq of what it did not have.

This is the last paragraph of Richard Cohen's latest column. I should have stopped reading right there.

Now, though, that gullibility is being matched by war critics who are so hyped on their own sanctimony that they will obliterate distinctions, punishing their friends for apostasy and, by so doing, aiding their enemies. If that's going to be the case, then Iraq is a war its critics will lose twice -- once because they couldn't stop it and once more at the polls.

Aw, I think the mean ol bloggers hurt his feelings.

That last sentence may actually be the weirdest thing I've ever read. The anti-war crowd can't win or lose the war itself - we already lost the only fight that matters: The war happened. Nevertheless, we've already been proven correct by events. The only question of victory or defeat that remains is for the US military.

Now, as for the question of electoral victory, I don't think anti-war partisans are going to have an electoral impact, one way or the other. Cohen seems to think that hysterical shrieking is going to freak the norms or something. If you read the full column (not that I recommend it) he compares it to the victory of Richard Nixon in 1968, which Cohen attributes to crazy left-wing activists swinging the vote to the GOP.

In Cohen's version of history, there was no racist appeals by the Nixon campaign, there was no divisions within the Democratic party itself, there was no crackdown in Chicago, and of course, there was no assasination of Robert Kennedy. No, what really mattered was that some hippies didn't shower.

It's worth remembering that Cohen supported this war - see his March 11, 2003 column "When Peace Is No Better Than War" (available on Lexis-Nexis) - for possibly the stupidest possible reason: Despite acknowledging that the Bush administration lied about everything in the run up to the war, Cohen wrote:

But the fact remains that were it not for those 250,000 troops sitting out in the desert, there would be no inspectors in Iraq. Hussein kicked them out once and he will kick them out again, just as soon as the world, as is its wont, loses interest and succumbs to the lust for oil, contracts and, in the case of France, the chimera of a glorious yesterday.

Why is it every US pundit assumes that France is motivated only by the desire to be a great power again, while the US is motivated by nothing by hugs and puppies? When, God when, will we see a Friedman, a Cohen, or even a Brooks admit that the US is motivated by the same lust for power that they accuse France and China of?

I recently saw "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's Oscar-nominated movie. It is based on the Holocaust experience of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish concert pianist. It occurred to me that for some of that time -- 1939, 1940 and almost all of 1941 -- the United States was at peace, faced with no imminent threat from Germany. It took the irrational attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan to get us into the war. Had Japan not struck, God only knows what might have happened.

I do not equate Iraq with Nazi Germany.

Nice. Cohen learned well from the Bushies - bring up WWII, but strenuously deny that you ever compared Hussein to Hitler.

The threat is not the same. But what is the same is that once again we are faced with a beast and the challenge to do something about him. The world has repeatedly ordered Hussein to disarm. He has not done so.

Actually, he had. And the inspectors that Cohen thinks only got in because of US militarism proved that Iraq had no WMDs well in advance of the war. But Cohen, like a good Republican, didn't believe them because after all, you can't trust the French. Or something.

I have neither the credentials nor the inclination to get into a theological dispute about a just war. Frankly, I think there is altogether too much "God talk" already. What's more, I have some doubts about this war -- especially the challenge of governing and rebuilding Iraq afterward. But I have less doubt about the sort of peace that would result from what, after all, would be appeasement. Saddam Hussein -- not to mention other despots -- will have taken the measure of us. He will resume his old ways. By then, a just war might be unthinkable -- and a just peace no longer in our grasp.

Munich, 1938 was the best thing to ever happen to warmongers. Step 1) Lie about an imaginary threat. Step 2) Prepare for war. Step 3) When challenged, claim that your opponents wouldn't have fought Hitler.

I'm not the first person to write this by any stretch, but it's worth repeating: The Munich analogy doesn't indict the anti-war crowd. Quite the opposite. After all, in 2003 there was only one country that had massive military superiority over its rivals, had spent years mantaining high levels of military spending despite a lack of serious enemies, and was preparing to invade a small country in defiance of international opinion and law. And it wasn't Iraq. If Churchill were alive today, he'd be in the House of Commons talking about the gathering threat the US posed to world peace. And he'd be just as surely ignored by his party as he was in the 1930s.