CAN'T YOU JUST FEEL THEIR PAIN?

Hugged by reality (Saul Singer, Jerusalem Post, March 11th, 2005)

Paleo-"liberals" like Fisk aside, if conservatives are liberals that have been "mugged" by reality, now we see that reality's "hug" can have the same effect. The more thoughtful Jonathan Freedland, for example, asks the right question in the Guardian: "Not only did we set our face against a military adventure which seems, even if indirectly, to have triggered a series of potentially welcome side effects; we also stood against the wider world-view that George Bush represented. What should we say now?"

But then Freedland, representing I imagine much of the anti-war crowd, performs this feat of acrobatics: "We can still argue that the war was wrong-headed, illegal, deceitful ... [though] we have to say that the call for freedom throughout the Arab and Muslim world is a sound and just one - even if it is a Bush slogan and arguably code for the installation of malleable regimes."

Sometimes one can only marvel at the mind's ability to compartmentalize. The war was right, legal, and to the extent it was deceitful, that was because war opponents could not admit has merit, and noisily demanded that Bush adopt the WMD-based UN authorization strategy.

It is dishonest for liberals to admit that Bush might be right about his democracy strategy without reexamining their own opposition to the war. But I'd rather let this debate over the past lie in exchange for a more important future-oriented rethink. Would Freedland, for example, consider that what he dismisses as a quest for "malleable regimes" is and always has been the heart of a sensible Bush strategy to beat terror?

On Tuesday, in an excellent speech at the National Defense University, Bush said: "The Iranian regime should listen to... the voice of the Iranian people, who long for their liberty... We look forward to the day when Iran joins in the hopeful changes taking place across the region ... [and] when the Iranian people are free."

The litmus test of whether liberals really get what Bush got years ago is whether they revert to form, and claim that democracy has no chance in Iran and that Bush is a warmonger for suggesting otherwise, or whether they join him in siding with the Iranian people.

What Bush has shown is that both the denial of the power of democracy and its realization are self-fulfilling prophesies. By joining the deniers, liberals have effectively sided with tyrants.

It must be extremely painful to move from seeing George Bush as the incarnation of evil to recognizing him as a liberator and strategic genius, especially when that means looking at yourself in the mirror and admitting whose causes you championed, which is why many won’t whatever he does.