We Have Always Been At War With Oceana

Playboy has nothing on the Left. Photo editors in that soft-porn mag exhibit a light touch compared to the way certain segments of the Left-Liberal chattering classes are air-brushing their recent screeds against the Bush policy in the Middle East.

For some the “quagmire” has disappeared, the “resistance” has morphed into “terrorists” and the self-evident “failure” of the invasion of Iraq has turned into a success that everyone knew would happen. Like the collapse of Communism in the USSR, the inevitable was pre-ordained and statements to the contrary are even now being flushed down the “memory hole.”

It is odd, and a little frightening, to see a repeat of Orwell’s 1984 replayed right in front of our eyes.

Victor David Hansen has been right about the big picture for so long, it is only right and fitting that he should do a victory lap in an essay entitled “ A Look Back, Turning point since September 11.”

An excerpt:

Without much appreciation that error is the stuff of war, that by any historical benchmark the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was nothing short of miraculous, that our ongoing assessments of success and failure changed hourly within the fluid 24-hour newscycle, or that acrimonious hindsight was often used to save face about earlier wrongheaded pronouncements, we continued to tally up the "I told you so's."

Lapses were, of course, numerous and easy to spot from our armchairs in America the morning after — laxity in securing borders and arms depots and reforming the Iraqi army, a too-prominent televised American profile from the Green Zone, tardiness in elections, too large and plodding an interim American bureaucracy, slowness in dispersing allotted aid, the April pullback from Fallujah, and so on. Add in Abu Ghraib, plus Syria's and Iran's agents and subsidies, and the reconstruction proved more difficult than the three-week victory might otherwise have presaged.

Many erstwhile supporters from the boomer generation — one that is more utopian and therapeutic than practical and tragic — simply bailed on the entire enterprise. They would not return until the successful elections on January 30 and the amazing aftershocks throughout the Middle East convinced them that their continued hypercriticism might leave them on the very wrong side of history.