Reactions to Victor Hanson Davis' "Feeding the Minotaur -- Our strange relationship with Islamofascists continues," National Review Online, June 14, 2004. 

Tom Wolfe already did radical chic three decades ago. It's getting shopworn. I find it hard to swallow the claim that the biggest threat to our civilization's survival is some university professors and contributors to the NYRB who are not exactly household names and whose worldview is rarely to be found on PBS, let alone on CNN. I simply do not believe that "retrograde clarity" (defined by Hanson as the defense of the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress) would cost anyone a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party (Oh... OK, maybe the Malibu party).

Yes, pace Hanson, the world is full of silly, self-important poseurs who enjoy nothing better than to work themselves into a froth of righteous anger. And they have this annoying habit of latching onto some little-known person or group as an heroic symbol of why their opponents are dastardly villains. Of course their heros are painted in a fashion totally unrecognizable to anyone who actually knows anything about them. But it's not really about those precious newly-discovered heros anyway, it's about using them to beat your opponent. For every courageous indigenous culture that's battling environmental genocide by globalizers there's a courageous band of freedom fighters, struggling against tyrrany and oppression, with a leader who's the second-coming of George Washington.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" wasn't invented in the last quarter of the 20th century. In fact the interesting thing about 9/11 was the absence of that debate. Even the folks who are condemned as Jeanne Kirkpatrick's "blame America first" crowd saw OBL and his group as terrorists, pure and simple. The debate has been over how to respond, but glamorizing the Islamists hasn't been exactly a fashionable policy option.

I wouldn't have troubled to write this long essay if that were all to Hanson's accusations. He'd just be the couturier version of Ann Coulter's pret a porter schtick. However, Hanson eventually gets to what he sees as the real battle between gnosis and the misguided Western elites in the aftermath of 9/11, which is the question of the Palestinans and the degree to which mobilizable hostility to the US in the Islamic world can be traced to the US' Israel policy.

Here we find the crux of Hanson's wholesale condemnation of Western elites -- the fact that some believe themselves capable of making moral and political distinctions between Palestinians and Islamist extremists and therefore are also capable of making distinctions in threat assessments and prescriptions for action. They simply don't accept our fearless leader's "you're either with us or with the terrorists." For all its binary simplicity (or if you prefer, moral clarity), Bush's assertion simply produces more complexity and has made it much more challenging to execute military operations or formulate and conduct policy. It certainly didn't get us the ancillary international forces on which the US military occupation of Iraq so obviously depended. It has continued to undermine any credibility of the US as a constructive sponsor of the "road map," since Israel is obviously part of "us." (I may shed no tears for lack of progress on the "road map," but the Bush Admin's nice sentiments coupled with impotence doesn't seem to be doing the US or anyone else a favor). If opposition to the US is the same as support for terrorists, it's easy to see how the psychological groundwork was laid for military police and interrogators to think the Iraqis they were handling are part of the same crowd that produced 9/11, and therefore a threat to the physical safety of the continental US.

And here's where Hanson's diatribe loses total credibility as far as I'm concerned. It seems that the chronic self-loathing that characterizes Western elites -- which has encouraged them to be Islamofascist supporters (read sympathetic to the Palestinians) for three decades -- is now morphing into anti-Semitism at the hands of a Hitler-style master propagandist, Osama bin Laden. I have to admit, I got lost trying to follow the nuances of his analogy, but the Hitler-OBL link is critical to the premise of the entire article: the enemy is among us. Andromeda's excerpts from Hanson's article leave out the para immediately following his potshot at Berkeley Free Speech-ites.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism grasped the advantages of hating the Jews. It has been 60 years since the Holocaust; memories dim. Israel is not poor and invaded but strong, prosperous, and unapologetic. It is high time, in other words, to unleash the old anti-Semitic infectious bacillus. Thus Zionists caused the latest Saudi bombings, just as they have poisoned Arab-American relations, just as neo-conservatives hijacked American policy, just as Feith, Perle, and Wolfowitz cooked up this war. [emphasis mine]

Forgive me, but for a man who condemns George Soro's sin of purportedly equating 9/11 with Abu Ghraib, Hanson's a bit reckless with his own moral equivalencies. One does not have to be an anti-Semite, or believe that Zionists "caused" the latest Saudi bombings, to be convinced that the Iraqi invasion, and the conduct of the occupation, can be attributed in great part to those neoconservatives who controlled the Department of Defense's policy, planning and intelligence and cut the paychecks for the CPA. If Feith, Perle and Wolfowitz aren't responsible, who the merry h-ll is? Last time I checked, even someone with as impecable credentials as Bill Kristol seemed to think that Wolfowitz et al had at least something rather significant to do with the formulation and conduct of the Bush Admin's Iraq policy.

Hanson may deny that the neocons "hijacked" US foreign policy, yet his analogy to Athens, King Minos and the Cretans, and Theseus suggests that it takes someone "impetuous" like Theseus to go against established policy and take the violent steps necessary to destroy the Minotaur. In the case of destroying the Islamofascists and putting an end to their slow eviservation of the West by occasional violent episodes and sustained blackmail, Hanson says it's actually very simple:

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

The paradox, according to Hanson, is that the all-powerful US is being paralyzed by a self-loathing elite that sees all people of color as sympathetic victims, that has been lulled into a mindset of temporizing and drawing easy moral equivalencies, and that is now succumbing to the machinations of a master propagandist who knows how to reawaken the long dormant (but ever present) bacillus of anti-Semitism. Hanson seems to think it just takes a Theseus (and if Wolfowitz & co are not his Theseus, who is?) to overcome the self-destructive policies that have succeeded in dominating our current-day Athens -- pointing as evidence of that domination to the pro-Palestinian signs found on university campuses.

It's a remarkably Manichaean view of the world, founded on two bizarre theses: that in the doctrinal wars of academia, not only are the left-wing apostates winning, but they're winning in the national marketplace of ideas; and sympathy for the Palestians (or even disapproval of actions of the Sharon government) is the moral equivalent of support for bin Laden.

Needless to say, the real world evidence that contradicts his analysis is overwhelming. For starters, it's not "radical chic" of a decadent elite that's keeping a substantial number of Hanson's fellow citizens from supporting the measures he assures us will keep us safe. Apart from those who believe the cost in blood and treasure is not worth the purported benefits, many believe a military offensive against terrorists in the Middle East and Asia would produce a far nastier and insecure world for generations to come, not just increase the risk of terrorist incidents in the next few years. It's not as Islamofascist fellow-travellers that many both in and out of the military question whether we would want to overhaul our society's basic structure to maintain the sort of military force necessary to keep the peace in the areas we had cleaned of Islamoterrorists. Nor is it self-loathing that's convinced many critics of the current Admin that they cannot trust them to pursue actions consistent with constitutional principles of governance or to tell the truth (even to the Supreme Court) about how they are conducting their policies. It's not budding anti-Semitism that has motivated much of the military's leadership to oppose both the goals and methods of the Bush Admin's military operations, which fundamentally contradict US military doctrine developed over the past 40 years of hard lessons learned in small wars. Nor is it sympathy for people of color that is the basis of the bitterness of the officer corps, who feel that once again they have been grossly betrayed by their civilian leaders and left holding the bag.

When I first read Hanson's article, I thought he should just re-read Tom Wolfe to get a grip and learn from the master how to skewer radical chic. But then with some difficulty I parsed Hanson's basic argument -- that the enemy within is Berkeley professors and their ilk, who are destroying the future of Western civlization by supporting the Palestinians, which prevents us from beating bin Laden. I now figure there's a better classic from the '70s he should revisit: Pogo.

For something more current from the blogosphere, I commend Medium Lobster in Saturday's Fafblog, courtsey Brad DeLong: The Medium Lobster Reaches the Bottom of the Slippery Slope http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001010.html