From PrawfsBlog; nicely said.
Why the Left Ought to Support (An Aspect of) Bush's Foreign Policy
I know some readers of this blog tend to be from the Left. Let me get my worry off my chest. One of the pathetic sights of the last few years has been the reluctance of the Left, here and in Europe, to denounce and reject Islamofascism. Yes, because, in spite of all the PC talk about Islam as a religion of peace, the enemy we are facing is Islamofascism (I hasten to say that not all Muslims are fascists). One of the great traditions of the Left has been its struggle against all forms of totalitarianism, especially of the fascist kind. Yet the Left has, to my knowledge, refused to endorse the message of the President's second inaugural address, when he promised to fight tyranny in the world. Why? Because the Left is partisan and hypocritical. The current ethos of the Left is to support any regime, even fascist ones, as long as they are targeted by a U.S. Republican administration. For the Left to take to the streets to support Saddam Hussein , a genocidal monster, is the ultimate shame for a political movement that, while slow to criticize Communism in the past, at least bravely fought fascist forms of oppression. The movement that took to the streets in 2003 was not to protest the horrendous dictatorship in Iraq, but to protest the intervention to overthrow the horrendous dictatorship. Shame on the Left. I think the Left has to reconstitute itself and recover the great imagination about equality and freedom, and stop obsessing about G.W.B. and conservatives. As far as I'm concerned, the Left today is a reactionary political movement. It not only supports Islamofascism. It also distrusts free markets, the one hope of reducing world poverty. Once you peel off all the layers of the onion, there's nothing left.
