February 27, 2004

Victor Davis Hanson

Friday and time for another wonderful essay by Victor Davis Hanson. Don't miss the profile of him in the LA Times This week he is talking about the vocabulary of anit-Americanism. bq. Words that Don’t Matter The new buzz vocabulary of anti-Americanism. bq. "Preemption" is supposed to be the new slur. Its use now conjures up all sorts of Dr. Strangelove images to denigrate the present "trigger-happy" Bush administration.... -- ...we have had two years now of national frenzy over a purported new "dangerous departure" in American foreign policy, one that "threatens" to "destabilize" the world order. bq. Rubbish. Preemption is a concept as old as the Greeks. It perhaps was first articulated in the fourth book of Thucydides's history. There the veteran Theban general Pagondas explained why his Boeotians should hit the Athenians at the border near Delium, even though they were already retreating and posed no immediate threat. The Boeotians did, and won — and were never attacked by the Athenians again. On a more immediate level, preemption was how many of us stayed alive in a rather tough grade school: Confront the bully first, openly, and in daylight — our Texan principal warned us — before he could jump you as planned in the dark on the way home. He goes on to give other examples of pre-emption in history: bq. Serbia posed no "imminent" threat to the United States in 1998; but President Clinton — with no U.N. sanction, no U.S. Congress resolution — finally decided to act and end that cancer before it spread beyond the Balkans. And more: bq. The Left's problem is not our embrace of the concept of "unilateralism" per se — or it would have attacked Clinton's U.N.-be-damned use of force in Iraq, Kosovo, and Haiti. And more: bq. If the embrace of multilateralism is meant to imply the desirability of U.N. sanction, then it is just as dubious a moral concept. Ask the Cambodians, Rwandans, Bosnians, or Kosovars whether they were encouraged by "multilateral" U.N. resolutions of "concern." In the last 40 years almost half the U.N.'s resolutions have been aimed at Israel — in an era when that body watched silently as tens of millions were butchered around the globe. Only a unilateral United States organized vetoes against Yasser Arafat's array of "Zionism is racism" resolutions. Usually the singular action of one democracy is worth more than all the majority votes of dozens of autocracies. Well done... Posted by DaveH at February 27, 2004 9:48 AM