Despite the absence of another 9/11-like attack, we are still told by the new terrorism czar, John Brennan, that the old war was largely a Bush failure. Administration officials keep inventing euphemisms. Some have dubbed the war on terror “an overseas contingency operation.”
We were once told that military tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act, and Predator drone attacks in Pakistan were George Bush’s assault on the Constitution rather than necessary tools to fight radical Islamic terrorists.
Not now. These policies are no longer criticized — even though they still operate more or less as they did under Bush. Guantanamo is still open, but no longer considered a gulag. The once-terrible war in Iraq disappeared off the front pages around late January of this year.
George Orwell, a man of the Left, warned us that freedom and truth are not endangered only by easily identifiable goose-stepping goons in jackboots. More often he felt that state collectivism would come from an all-powerful government — run by a charismatic egalitarian, promising to protect us from selfish, greedy reactionaries.
Orwell was on to something.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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