Well written editorial:
The Left collapses
Though its candidate handily won re-election in January, 2003 has not been a kind year to the Israeli Right.
If the Right entered the year harboring the hope that the creation of a Palestinian state might yet be averted, that hope collapsed with Ariel Sharon's speech last week to the Herzliya conference. For now, Israel's "ideological" debate amounts to this: How deep a withdrawal, and how fast.
Yet elsewhere in the world, 2003 was the year in which the Left collapsed, morally and intellectually speaking. In Europe and America, the Left first staked its honor on opposing the war in Iraq. When the war came, it rooted for America to lose. When the war was won, it could do nothing but carp. At no point did it show any joy in the liberation of 23 million souls from tyranny, except in the form of the petulant "of course." As in: "Of course the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, but Bush lied!"
The British writer Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer, puts the matter nicely: "For the first time in its history, the Left has nothing to say to the victims of fascism." The Left may have been silent about Stalin's crimes. But until fairly recently it could be relied on to denounce the likes of Saddam Hussein, which in fact it did in the 1980s.
No longer. If anything defines the Left that gathered by the millions in the streets of London and Paris and San Francisco to protest the war, it is anti-Americanism, closely followed by anti-Zionism. If America is for it, it must be bad; if against, probably good. According to this orthodoxy, there is no crime, however far-flung, for which blame cannot be laid at Washington's feet. And there is no dictator, however wicked, whose crimes can even begin to compare to those of the Toxic Texan.
All this became depressingly clear in 2003. Yes, there were defensible reasons to oppose the war: because democracy and the Arab world won't mix; because the enraged Arab street might topple friendly regimes; because Iraq must be held together, and that can only be by force; because America can't be trusted to do the job right; because the weapons of mass destruction threat was overblown; because America faces graver crises in Iran and Korea.
Each of these points makes for a good argument. For the Left, however, they were peripheral at best. It's interesting, for example, to hear Bush's fiercest critics go on about the failure to find WMD, as if WMD was something they ever previously cared about one way or the other.
No: What the Left claims to care about are human rights. Yet given the opportunity to force the greatest human-rights abuser on earth from power, they demur. Why? Because in their culturally relative world view, moral judgment may only be passed on their own kind. To this Left, the goal of Western policy makers ought to be to wash its own hands spotlessly clean, rather than wash the hands of others. Yet like Lady Macbeth, no amount of washing will ever really do; the accumulated sins of capitalism and ecological devastation are too grave.
It would be nice to believe that the Left of which we write is only a fringe. It is not. In America, it is what propels Howard Dean's presidential candidacy. In Britain, it is what animates the Liberal Democrats and much of Labour's back bench.
Much can go wrong in 2004. If this Left comes to power in 2004, it would be the worst of it.
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