It was early 2002, right after the State of the Union Address in which President George W. Bush famously linked Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical Iraqi regime in an “axis of evil” with the rogue governments of Iran and North Korea. On a dais at the influential Council on Foreign Relations, the man whom Bush had defeated in the historically contentious 2000 election strode to the podium and delivered, of all things, a spirited defense of his nemesis.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Al Gore declaimed, “there really is something to be said for occasionally putting diplomacy aside and laying one's cards on the table. There is value in calling evil by its name.” Recalling the Clinton administration’s fitful, feckless, and futile attempts to rein in the Iraqi dictator’s terror mongering and quest for weapons of mass destruction, the former vice president described Iraq as “a virulent threat in a class by itself.” As war clouds hovered, he darkly rued the U.S. failure to remove Saddam in 1991, boldly insisting that this time “failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit.”
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.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
