by Paul Kengor
After all that, Murtha must have stunned his constituents by announcing that he would be happy to have the Islamist terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay relocated to his district of “rednecks” in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. “Sure, I'd take ’em,” said Murtha. “They're no more dangerous in my district than in Guantanamo.”25
Even Murtha's fellow Democrats raised an eyebrow at that one. Well, maybe not all Democrats. Dick Durbin was on board with the idea, too. When President Obama considered new locations for Guantanamo within the United States, he called Durbin, his former Illinois colleague. Sure enough, Durbin professed the Heartland as the ideal place to house the world's most dangerous terrorists. “Make no mistake about it,” said a grateful Senator Durbin, “this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We have a chance to bring more than two thousand good-paying jobs with benefits to this region.”26
When it came to trashing the troops, Murtha and Durbin were newcomers. An old hand at such rhetoric was John Kerry. Almost thirty-five years after he testified to “war crimes” allegedly committed by his fellow troops, Kerry was back, in a new war, once again to blister American soldiers abroad.
In December 2005, on CBS's Face the Nation, Senator Kerry insisted to Bob Schieffer: “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the—of—the historical customs, religious customs.”27 Kerry had suddenly reversed the terms in the War on Terror: it was the American troops fighting the war against terrorism who were now guilty of terror.
Just imagine how Kerry's assessment had served the interests of the true terrorists wreaking havoc inside Iraq. No doubt, al-Qaeda wished it could print his words on fliers.
Senator Kerry's statement, made against an American military fully committed to avoiding civilian casualties, was inexcusable. His assessment was remarkably similar to his 1971 Senate testimony, with Kerry merely leaving out the words “genitals” and “Genghis Khan.”
Much milder, but still hurtful, was Kerry's degrading statement in October 2006, when the junior senator from Massachusetts cracked this joke to a group of California college students: “You know, education, if you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.”28
It is almost unbelievable that such a crack came from a veteran, and a highly educated one at that.
Kennedy and Columbia
Many of the same figures who made outrageous statements during the Cold War were still making outrageous statements during the War on Terror. It seemed as if they never learned from past mistakes. Most never even saw their statements as mistakes.
Senator Ted Kennedy—who in the 1960s had made terrible accusations against U.S. troops in Vietnam, and who in the 1980s had ridiculed President Reagan and his ideas, and had made an extraordinarily improper confidential “offer” to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov—emerged during the War on Terror as a cruel critic of the American president and of the troops under the president's command.
On May 10, 2004, Kennedy went to the Senate floor and declared: “On March 19, 2004, President Bush asked: ’Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?’ Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management—U.S. management.”29
Though Kennedy's hyperbolic condemnation of the Abu Ghraib scandal was intended to rip President Bush, it was an arrow at the heart of the U.S. military personnel who ran the detainee camps. It was also an absurd analogy, as practically any member of Congress with even rudimentary knowledge of Saddam Hus-sein's “Republic of Fear” would have known. The single worst case of unauthorized abuse by U.S. military personnel after 9/11 does not begin to compare to the daily terror that Saddam employed against Iraqi women, children, Shiites, Marsh Arabs, army deserters, dissidents, and on and on.
Just as he had targeted Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Senator Kennedy focused his ire on the conservative president in the White House during the War on Terror. The senior senator from Massachusetts had sought to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Bush case for war even before the postwar occupation/recon-struction of Iraq went sour, and before body bags piled up.
For instance, in September 2003 Kennedy made the unsupportable claim that George W. Bush had pursued the Iraq war strictly for political purposes, not for strategic or foreign-policy purposes. Kennedy said that the decision to go to war had been a “fraud” that was “made up in Texas.” The president and his political advisers had “announced … to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically.”30
The problem with this very serious allegation was that it was not remotely logical. In fact, at the moment that Bush decided to pursue a risky path to war in Iraq, he was still surfing an unprecedented wave of popularity. Bush gave up that popularity to do what he thought was right in Iraq, which he saw (correctly or incorrectly) as central to a wider victory in the War on Terror. Bush can be accused of many things, even a bad war policy, but he cannot be accused of going to war to help his popularity, which was already sky-high.
Although Kennedy was roundly criticized for his nonsensical argument against the Iraq war, he persisted in this line of attack. He went to the Senate floor a few weeks later, in October 2003, to assert that the president's alleged “trumped-up reasons for going to war have collapsed” under the weight of “lie after lie after lie.” The Bush administration, said the senator, “still refuses to face the truth or tell the truth.”31
In January 2007, when the Bush mission in Iraq had finally begun to turn around thanks to the surge, Kennedy invoked Vietnam, that national “quagmire.” “Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam,” the Massachusetts senator declared.32
Ted Kennedy's high-profile criticisms did not serve truth. They did not serve the American mission in Iraq. They served only the aims of the enemy that the Bush policy hoped to vanquish.
Leftists in media and academia joined politicians like Kennedy in attacking the White House. Walter Cronkite, another voice from the Cold War, who had long since retired as CBS news anchor, decried President Bush's “arrogance” and forecast a “very, very dark” future for the country—again like Vietnam.33 From the academic ranks, a notable example was well-known history professor Eric Foner. The onetime president of the American Historical Association was a professor at—you guessed it—Columbia University.
Foner had George W. Bush in mind when he claimed: “I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.”34
Professor Foner's statement was one of remarkable hyperbole, especially from a decorated historian who lives and teaches in New York City, site of the 9/11 apocalypse. When criticized for this remark, specifically in a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Foner knew what to do: he blamed Joe McCarthy. The criticism smacked of “McCarthyism,” cried Foner in a cover story in The Progressive; it smelled of “blacklisting.” It was “disturbing,” and “loyalty oaths” were possibly right around the corner.35 Foner seemed to sense yet another apocalypse, this one with Joe McCarthy as lead horseman.
When it came to apocalyptic rhetoric, another leader far outdid anything George W. Bush ever said. That leader was Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hopes to engulf the nation of Israel in an unholy nuclear inferno. At a December 12, 2006, gathering of Holocaust deniers—a group of which he is a vocal member—Ahmadinejad pledged that “the Zionist regime soon [will] be wiped out and humanity will be free.” The Iranian madman replaced the executed Saddam Hussein as the world's leading anti-Semite, terrorist sponsor, and desirer of nuclear weapons.36
Eric Foner complained little about Ahmadinejad's truly murderous rhetoric and dangerous objectives. In fact, he defended the Iranian hatemonger against his own university's president when Columbia
offered Ahmadinejad a platform in September 2007.
Yes, the same university that invited Bill Ayers to enter its doctoral program in education lent its Ivy League imprimatur to another preacher of violence. Columbia invited Ahmadinejad to speak when the Iranian despot came to New York to address the United Nations. John Dewey's university again broke new ground in higher education.
The day of the event, Columbia president Lee Bollinger—perhaps to defuse the national outrage over his invitation to Ahmadinejad—harshly criticized the Iranian leader in his introductory remarks. Foner later took Bollinger to task for not rolling out the red carpet for Ahmadinejad. He was one of more than a hundred Columbia professors who signed a “statement of concern” about Bollinger's leadership, which cited, among other issues, the “strident tone” of the university president's introductory comments. Bollinger had committed a cardinal sin at Columbia: as Foner and his fellow faculty wrote in their statement, Bollinger's Ahmadinejad introduction “allied the University with the Bush administration's war in Iraq, a position anathema to many in the University community.”37 Foner went further in a follow-up faculty meeting, criticizing Bollinger for having used “the language of warfare at a time when the administration of our country is trying to whip up Iran, and to my mind is completely inaccurate.”38
Many of those in the Columbia audience for Ahmadinejad's speech apparently shared Foner's deference to the Iranian antidemocrat. The crowd applauded lustily when the leader of Tehran's repressive regime chastised Bollinger by saying that in Iran they allow people “to make their own judgment.” No doubt, too, the Columbia faithful were pleased to hear him bash George W. Bush and U.S. foreign policy. Those attacks on the United States came amid his insistence that Iran should have a nuclear program and amid a series of denials—that Iran was a longtime sponsor of terrorism, that the Holocaust happened, and that homosexuals existed in Iran.39
Remarkably, the Ahmadinejad episode may not have been Columbia University's most ignominious moment in the War on Terror. That honor may belong to a faculty-led “teachin” against the Iraq war held at Columbia on March 26, 2003—and organized by Professor Foner. At the antiwar rally, Professor Nicholas De Genova wished “a million Mogadishus” upon U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a reference to the Somalia tragedy a few years earlier, when the corpses of American boys were mutilated and dragged through the streets—captured on film for their families (and the world) to see.40
Columbia University made a seamless transition from Cold War inanity to War on Terror inanity.
Jimmy Carter Returns
Jimmy Carter may have lost forty-four of fifty states to Ronald Reagan in 1980, but his work was far from finished. He reemerged to play a very active role in world affairs as ex-president, accommodating both post–Cold War Communist despots and post-9/11 Islamic despots. Regarding the former, one particular case merits special mention: Carter's June 1994 visit to the world's most repressive state, North Korea.
Carter's account of the trip defies imagination. Kim Il Sung was a tyrant, one who died mere weeks after Carter's visit.41 But the impressionable ex-president found Kim “vigorous, alert, intelligent,” and a man who engaged in “very free discussions with his ministers.”
Kim spearheaded a militantly atheistic regime. But Carter, a born-again Baptist, found Kim “very friendly toward Christianity.”42
Kim took the former American president on a Potemkin-village tour of Communist North Korea. Carter was impressed, reporting home to his fellow Americans:
We found Pyongyang to be a bustling city. The only difference is that during working hours there are very few people on the street. They all have jobs or go to school. And after working hours, they pack the department stores, which Rosalynn visited. I went in one of them. It's like Wal-Mart in American stores on a Saturday afternoon. They all walk around in there, and they seem in fairly good spirits. Pyongyang at night looks like Times Square. They are really heavily into bright neon lights and pictures and things like that.43
In truth, North Korea is a literal sea of darkness. As satellite imagery shows, at night the northern half of the Korean Peninsula is draped in black—that is, when the lights are not ablaze to hoodwink America's most naïve ex-president—in contrast to the southern half, which is awash in the glow of freedom.44
Most tragic, within one year of Carter's enthusiastic appraisal, two to three million North Koreans (out of a population of twenty million) would starve to death in this Communist dungeon of a country.45
A few years after that, the North Korean regime announced that it was a nuclear state, a direct violation of the Agreed Framework that Carter had brokered with Kim in 1994. Back then, Carter had stood outside the Clinton White House and triumphantly assured reporters that “the crisis is over”—words headlined by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even many Democrats were wary of that grand declaration.46
Carter continued offering such unbelievable appraisals into the War on Terror, shifting almost seamlessly from the likes of Kim to Saddam. As President George W. Bush prepared for war in Iraq, Carter urged a return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq—the same inspectors whom Saddam had repeatedly expelled as they had closed in on suspected weapons sites.47
Throughout the debate over war in Iraq, Carter smashed the time-honored tradition that ex-presidents refrain from public criticism of sitting presidents, especially in wartime. Carter penned an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “The Troubling New Face of America,” in which he lamented the “belligerent and divisive” Bush administration and its lack of “comprehensible” Middle East policy.48
His criticism grew even more personal in an op-ed for the New York Times. On March 9, 2003—exactly one month before ecstatic Iraqis pounced on a fallen statue of Saddam at Baghdad's Firdos Square—Carter fired a salvo titled “Just War—or a Just War?”49 In this article the former president charged not only that the current president was shattering two centuries of “consistent bipartisan commitments” in foreign policy but also that Bush—self-professing Christian—was in “violation” of sixteen centuries of “just war” doctrine. “As a Christian” who was “thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war,” Carter judged himself fit to decide that Bush's “substantially unilateral attack” on Iraq “does not meet” just-war standards50—especially as the president's Pentagon (allegedly) fired upon a “defenseless Iraqi population.”
The New York Times typically did not look kindly upon presidents integrating their faith into policy.51 This time, however, was different. The editorial board suspended its usual objections, offering the Georgia Baptist a platform to employ his Christianity—at least in service against George W. Bush.
Unfortunately for Saddam, Carter was not able to spare him from U.S. tanks, just as the ex-president was not able to rescue him during the first Persian Gulf War in January 1991.52 Later, however, Carter made his way to the Middle East to engage another terrorist leadership: Hamas. There, the ex-president blasted Bush and his State Department for daring to call the terrorist group “terrorist.” “After they [Hamas] got elected to head their government,” said an angry Carter, “they were declared to be terrorists.”53
Even many of Carter's admirers in the press were taken aback by this one. Asked by an incredulous reporter whether he trusted Hamas, Carter objected: “It's not a matter of trusting them. It's a matter of what … they've pledged to do. They've gone on record as being amenable to a number of the proposals I've made.”54
Carter has not expressed regret for such remarks about the evil men running Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their terrorist allies. Rather, he regrets George W. Bush's January 2002 remark in which he labeled as “evil” the men running Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their terrorist allies.55 “I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement,” sniffed Carter.56
Duped by Saddam: “Baghdad Jim” and Friends
Troubling as these post-9/11 examples are, most of them are not classic cases of
dupery, wherein the liberals were carefully manipulated by the enemy. But the War on Terror has produced clear incidents of dupery in the strict sense—that is, cases of America's enemies seeking out liberals for assistance. Hollywood stars such as Sean Penn and Annette Bening have been flown to places like Baghdad and Tehran, where their hosts hoped they would return to America singing the praises of some of the most illiberal and intolerant men on the planet—and denouncing the man in the White House.57
More disturbing are the elected officials who have been targeted as dupes. In one outrageous instance, three congressmen traveled to Saddam Hussein's Iraq months before a single American troop was dispatched to take down Saddam's regime. Congressmen Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan, and Mike Thompson of California made the trip in September 2002, as the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action in Iraq.
All three men had served in the military during Vietnam, with Thompson seeing combat through the 173rd Airborne. But these liberal Democrats were all predictable antiwar, anti-Bush votes. If Saddam was fishing for suckers, McDermott and Bonior in particular would be among the very best candidates in the U.S. Congress. Of course, Saddam knew that, which is why he wanted them in Iraq for potential exploitation.