The Appeasers This Time

Nostalgic for the 30s?

They're back:

If the White House has sometimes appeared naive about the “terrible” violence in Baghdad (as Bush called it earlier this week) and the great challenges remaining, its critics have an opposite problem: an unflappable fatalism. For them, Iraq remains a horrid waste of American lives and resources. Its imminent collapse signals the failure of the entire democracy project in the Middle East. Democratic leaders such as Howard Dean call for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal, while liberal religious journals such as The Christian Century demand “a season of repentance” for American misdeeds.

We’ve seen this mood before. It is reminiscent of the cynicism of progressives in the 1930s, who viewed the struggle against Nazi Germany in the black light of the First World War. Isolationists such as Joseph Kennedy did everything possible to delay American entry into the European conflict. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of The Christian Century, belittled the Allied effort as “a war for imperialism” (not much has changed at the magazine, it seems). Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the best-known preachers in America, claimed that even a war against fascism would be “utterly and irredeemably unchristian.”

There were wiser voices making themselves heard — Reinhold Niebuhr, Lewis Mumford, Lynn Harold Hough and others — that are worth recalling in the present moment. Mumford, a humanist philosopher who joined Niebuhr’s band of “Christian realists,” viewed his own generation as “smug and cynical” in their contempt for any effort to defend democracy against Nazi terror. The reason, he argued, was their fixation on the horrific costs of WWI and the imperfect peace it achieved. “In an orgy of debunking,” Mumford wrote in early 1941, “my generation defamed the acts and nullified the intentions of better people than themselves.” As a result, they were nearly incapable of judging honestly the Nazi threat to civilization — and what it might require to defeat it.

Al-Maliki’s speech to Congress stands as a reproach to the debunkers of our own day. He was sober, yet not cynical, about America’s and the world’s failure to support Iraq’s stirrings toward freedom, particularly after the first Gulf War. “In 1991, when Iraqis tried to capitalize on the regime’s momentary weakness and rose up, we were alone again,” he said. He might have mentioned that thousands of Iraqis perished at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Yet he immediately added that Iraqis would never forget the continued support of the American people. A fatalist wouldn’t put much stock in the U.S. commitment to Iraq, as Al-Maliki, facing daily risks for doing so, clearly does. Bush’s leadership on this point, backed up by the exceptional effort of the U.S.-led coalition, explains much of this confidence.

Back then, the "progressives" were only doing what the ComIntern instructed.

Who do you think is typing up their talking points today?