Short History of Bush the Divider

The following quoted from
Frontpage discussion between David Horowitz and Peter Beinhart relative to "soft and hard liberals". The discussion is a nice short synapsis of how difficult it is to support the typical Democrat / MSM synthesis that "Bush is the divider, and Iraq is the dividing point".

In your view, the problem we are discussing is not really a problem created by liberals and leftists. It is – like many other problems as you see them – a dilemma created by George Bush.

You regard Bush as the divider, and the declaration of war in Iraq as the division point. But how much reality is there in this claim? The use of force in Iraq was authorized by both parties and by UN Resolution 1441, which was a war ultimatum. (This is not a conservative view. It was so described by Hans Blix, who of course is a Swedish socialist, in his book Disarming Iraq). 

The ultimatum deadline for Saddam was set for December 7, 2002. Saddam failed to meet the deadline, in fact did not take it seriously (again, this is the judgment of Blix). This was the 17 UN Security Council Resolution he had basically ignored. The United States and Britain felt that 17 was more than enough and to fail to enforce a war ultimatum would have created a very dangerous situation. But three of the veto powers on the Security Council refused to join America and Britain in enforcing the ultimatum they had signed, leaving it to Bush and Blair to go it alone. These are the facts.

The reason there was no Security Council support for enforcing the ultimatum is that France, Russia and China were actually allies of Saddam who had armed him to the teeth and probably helped him to squirrel his WMDs to Syria just before the war broke out.

Nancy Pelosi began the Democratic attacks on this war on April 13, 2003, six weeks after it started, and just four and a half months after the Democrats in Congress had voted overwhelmingly to authorize the use of force against Saddam. By June, the Democratic Party leadership was in full attack mode over the trivial Niger issue, calling the commander-in-chief a liar who had gone to war on false premises. In fact Jimmy Carter and Al Gore had already launched attacks on Bush’s foreign policy that were unprecedented in their harshness in September 2002, even as Bush was attempting to bring Saddam to heel and going to the UN General Assembly for help. So how can Bush be blamed for being the divider and using the war as a wedge issue, when the Democrats who betrayed their own votes to authorize force were clearly the aggressors?

You have invoked Truman, as an exemplar of Cold War liberalism to distinguish him from the conservatism of George Bush. I have already dealt with this in relation to the nuclear threat. But even on the conventional front it is hard to see any difference between the positions of Truman and Bush. Did North Korea’s attack on South Korea pose an “imminent threat” to the United States? Hardly. Did Truman get UN support? Yes. But how was he able to do that? Because Russia had previously walked out of the UN Security Council and was unable to exercise its veto. If Russia had not denied itself the veto, Truman would have been in the same position as Bush was in regard to Iraq following the Security Council war ultimatum. In other words, he would have been faced with the decision to go to war without UN approval or let the North Korean Communist aggressors conquer the South. Is there any doubt in your mind as to what decision Truman would have made?

If Truman had come to the aid of the South Koreans without UN support how many Democrats do you think would have opposed him? We can only speculate on the answer but the fact is that Vito Marcantonio, a Communist fellow-traveler, was the lone vote in Congress against the Korean war. Whereas more than 100 Democrats voted against the use of force to topple Saddam Hussein, not only in 2002, but in 1990 following his invasion of Kuwait. Only six Democrat senators voted to oppose Saddam’s aggression in 1990. One of those was Al Gore who has now joined the anti-war camp. What a different party the Democrats became after 1972. Surely you cannot lay all this at the feet of George Bush.

So, yes, the question before us, as you put it, is flagging Democratic support for the anti-jihadist struggle. You and I both think that there are too few Democrats committed to this cause. But you attribute this to the divisive incompetence of Bush. I don’t, and my critique of your book is that you fail to examine how the Democratic Party went from a Party in which only one of its members voted against the Korean War, to the party of 1980s which in its majority opposed the anti-Communist struggle in Central America, and the party of 1990 which in its majority opposed the anti-Saddam war, and the party of 2006 which is virtually united in its opposition to the war against al-Qaeda and its allies in Iraq.