Via Democracy Guy, I saw this story about Idiotarian George Galloway, the Saddam-loving, Stalin-worshipping, British MP:
The Guardian blog is reporting that George Galloway has taken the opportunity of the terrorist attacks in London today to score political points.There are so many things wrong with that statement that it would take a week to list them all, but Democracy Guy summed it up nicely.1513 Respect MP George Galloway says: "We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."London's been a target. London will be a target. For a long time. Anyone who thinks anything Britain has or hasn't done since September 11 has increased or decreased London's likelihood of being a target for Al Queda is simply a damn fool. And to make a statement like that on a day like today, while bodies are still being pulled out of tube stations, reveals precisely the sort of sub-human George Galloway is.
One point he didn't highlight, which deserves notice, is this: it's common among liberals who deny that they're soft on national security to make the argument, "We're not opposed to a strong America defending itself. We're against the Iraq war because [pick one or more] it's the Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time (tm)/the White House didn't plan properly for the war/it will make us less safe/Bush lied! But we're not opposed to all wars. After all, we supported the attack on Afghanistan. All Democrats did. You're impugning our patriotism to suggest that we wouldn't have. Of course Al Gore or John Kerry would have, if they'd have been president. They just would have been smarter about Iraq."
But more and more, I see the sort of statements Galloway made: "We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain." (Emphasis added.) Afghanistan gets lumped in with Iraq as something which "has made us less safe."
Of course, liberals will argue that (a) George Galloway isn't American, and (b) George Galloway is a freaking lunatic. And they'd be right. Obviously Galloway doesn't speak for many mainstream American liberals -- although there was plenty of cheering for him in the liberal blogosphere after his combative appearance before Congress earlier this year. But I see the same sort of Afghanistan-And-Iraq language being used more and more.
No, I don't think that liberals are unpatriotic. Nor do I think they're so weak that they wouldn't have responded to 9/11 by attacking Afghanistan. But I do think that they reflexively assume that American military power is useless or even counterproductive, that "wars never solve anything," etc. Hence after the shock of 9/11 had worn off, they hopped right off the military bandwagon.
Comments (3)
Any actual examples besides Galloway?
Posted by Dave | July 10, 2005 5:02 PM
Posted on July 10, 2005 17:02
Dave: Google afghanistan and iraq and "less safe" and you'll find scores of such. Half of them on DailyKos or Democraticunderground.com, to be sure. (Throw in the terms "occupations" or "invasions" for bonus points.)
For instance, here's Tariq Ali: (yes, it's another non-American).
Here's an American. Active in the "peace movement," to be sure, which makes her farther left than the average Democrat -- but that's part of the point I was trying to make. That is, Democrats moved to the center right after 9/11, but once Iraq became the issue, they moved back to the left. Here's someone else in the peace movement.
Here's Juan Cole. Yes, he's repeating the claims of the Al Qaeda group which claimed responsibility for London -- but he's endorsing them as well.
Ted Rall lumps Afghanistan and Iraq together regularly. (He calls them the "illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.")
Posted by David Nieporent | July 15, 2005 12:28 PM
Posted on July 15, 2005 12:28
The problem with your post is that it implies that liberals said they supported the war in Afghanistan and then either stopped pretending or changed their minds. Do you have any examples of people who initially *supported* the war now criticizing it (and not just criticizing the way it was conducted, but criticizing the actual mission)? Ted Rall was always against the war in Afghanistan (he wrote a book about it), as were Mahajan and Benjamin. I'm pretty confident Galloway was, too.
And to elaborate on my parenthetical above, one can have supported the war at first, but then criticized the administration for failing to follow through on the Afghanistan mission (and diverting resources to Iraq), and still be perfectly consistent and patriotic.
As for Juan Cole, I think you're making several logical leaps in saying that he "endorsed" the statement by the terrorists. I'm not even sure it was an "endorsable" statement. He reported a claim that the bombing was in retaliation for events in Afghanistan, but such a statement on its own really doesn't tell you whether the war in Afghanistan made us more or less safe, on net.
Posted by Dave | July 19, 2005 2:35 AM
Posted on July 19, 2005 02:35