OH COME ON, MR. SMITH, TELL US WHAT YOU REALLY THINK.

Why I’m backing Bush (Iain Duncan Smith, The Spectator, September 18th, 2004)

The sophisticates’ forgetfulness of history is dangerous. When there is no Lincoln, Truman, Reagan or Bush, who is there? There is Bill Clinton and the European Union. An attitude of supine indifference, glossed as multilateralism, was the fertile seedbed of Osama bin Laden and led directly, through outrages of escalating daring, to September 11. And the claim that in the absence of a strong America the EU can mount an effective response to genocide was, surely, for ever disgraced on the killing fields of Srebrenica. Let those two events stand as testament to the outlook of the liberal Left, and shame the deluded fans of Michael Moore.

The protesters who marched through New York two week ago under the banner of Michael Moore were united solely by a negative. The Bush-haters have neither a plan nor a purpose. Their sophistication has become sophistry. Their panacea for global politics is to pray-in-aid the United Nations, the body which for 12 years stood by as Saddam Hussein flouted its every resolution, and whose officials — as now appears — were engaged in the systematic corruption of the oil-for-food programme, channelling funds into the pockets of Saddam’s own relatives. This outrage has gone scarcely reported, while Michael Moore makes lucrative hay with some disconnected allegations, pointing in contradictory directions, about the Bush family’s business interests.

The UN is an institution with a genius for inaction. It cannot lead nations: nations must lead it. But to the Michael Moore Bush-haters ‘leadership’ is cant for oppression and exploitation, and the rudderless UN is the institutional image of themselves — a camp whose pompous self-regard is in inverse proportion to its achievements and its vision. As Nick Cohen recently concluded in the New Statesman, ‘There is no longer a Left with a message of hope for the human race. The audiences at Michael Moore’s films ... have no policy to offer. The noise of their self-righteous anger is merely a cover for an indifference bred of failure.’