David Horowitz
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/davidhorowitz/printdh20030210.shtml
February 10, 2003
Secessionists against the war
I'm looking at a full page advertisement in Sunday's NY Times by the
celebrated counter-culture author Wendell Berry called "A Citizen's
Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America." The strategy is known as the Bush Doctrine, and was adopted
in September of last year (it is available on the White House
website). In my view, this is the most important strategy statement
made by our government since the Truman Doctrine of 1947. Its salient
features are a recognition that the nation's present war crisis is
caused by the fact that we have arrived at a historical crossroads
where radical ideologies and modern technologies of mass destruction
meet, and that this requires us to 1) maintain a military supremacy
that cannot be challenged; 2) pre-empt terrorist revolutionaries both
fascist and Communist like Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim
Jong Il, who will strike us without warning; and 3) reserve the right
to act unilaterally in our self-defense, i.e., be the masters of our
political fate. The first thing that struck me about the Berry ad is
how rich the querulous left has become -- the same left which
pretends to be the voice of the powerless and the poor. A full-page
ad in the NY Times costs close to $100,000. I have personally seen
half a dozen of these since 9/11, which attack corporate America and
the American government and find ways to sympathize with our nation's
enemies. (Cheap, second-hand Marxism seems to be the only paradigm
available to leftist critics of the President and the war.) Since the
Times and the mass media generally have been critical of the
President's war policy, and the allegedly "unilateralist" nature of
official United States policy, one has to conclude that these
leftists with their deep pockets are so radical and so unhappy with
the loyal critics of the war, that they are willing to squander
prodigious amounts of cash to gain a platform for their extreme
screeds. Like his political peers, Wendell Berry is wildly unhappy
with American democracy and with the American people because they
have ratified through two congresses, presidential requests to go to
war with Iraq (I am speaking here of the Clinton request for war
powers in 1998 and the Bush request last year). Of course he does not
say this in so many words. Like his peers Berry ignores these
ratifications and pretends instead to speak in behalf of the
allegedly silent people, and in the fatuous phrase favored by
radicals "speak truth to power," as though the power in this country
were illegitimate and did not flow from the people themselves.
Radicals with this perspective are what I call the "secessionists"
over the war. They want to make a separate peace as though the
terrorists have not condemned all Americans regardless of race,
gender, age or political viewpoint for that matter. They want to
disown the courageous acts of their own government in defending the
world's peoples against tyrants like Saddam Hussein. They have a
loathing -- which is really a self-loathing -- for their own country.
In the end, their secessionism is really a form of anti-Americanism,
because they are self-declared revolutionaries against the America we
all inhabit, and therefore share an agenda with our enemies, which is
the destruction of the American system as we know it. Now to Berry's
complaint. Berry singles out the following passage from the Bush
strategy paper as "its central and most significant
statement." "While the United States will constantly strive to enlist
the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to
act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by
acting pre-emptively against such terrorists..." A reader of these
words who does not harbor intense feelings of hostility towards the
United States cannot fail to be impressed by their
reasonableness. "While the United States will constantly strive to
enlist the support of the international community," we will defend
ourselves against attack, even if it means not waiting for terrorists
who have declared their intention to do us harm to actually carry out
those intentions. Berry, on the other hand, cannot contain his
outrage. "A democratic citizen must deal here first of all with the
question, Who is this 'we,'? It is not the 'we' of the Declaration of
Independence, which referred to a small group of signatories bound by
the conviction that 'governments [derive] their just power from the
consent of the governed. And it is not the 'we' of the Constitution,
which refers to 'the people [my emphasis -- WB] of the United
States.' This 'we' of the new strategy can refer only to the
President. It is a royal 'we.'" A dictator's "we." This is because
under the strategy the President "will need to justify his intention
by secret information," and will have to "execute his plan without
forewarning." This leads Berry to conclude: "The idea of a government
acting alone in pre-emptive war is inherently undemocratic, for it
does not require or even permit the President to obtain the consent
of the governed." rForget the impracticality of submitting complex
geopolitical decisions based on sensitive intelligence reports (which
dreamers like Berry of course can't be bothered with.) The President
already has that consent through two votes of Congress. Berry doesn't
seem to understand the most basic fact about our constitutional
democracy -- that it is a representative democracy -- it doesn't
require Wendell Berry's direct consent or a referendum of the
population before the President acts in our defense. Indeed, the
Constitution gave the war-making powers to the Senate, in those days
an un-elected body. Could the founders have known something about
democratic passions that Berry doesn't? Perhaps Berry regards Sean
Penn's walk-on role as a weapons inspector in Iraq as the vox populi
in action. I will not bore readers with Berry's descent into
communist bathos, with his argument -- familiar from bilious screeds
of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said -- that there is really no difference
between the terrorist acts of terrorists and the military acts of the
United States. ("The National Security Stategy wishes to
cause 'terrorism' to be seen 'in the same light as slavery, piracy or
genocide' -- but not in the same light as war. It accepts and affirms
of the legitimacy of war." Well of course. And what's the alternative
except surrender? Berry takes strong exception to the Bush Doctrine's
declaration of indpendence from the rule of the world's tyrannies,
slavocracies and kleptocracies through international
instrumentalities like the UN and the World Court. The Bush
Doctrine: "We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our
efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans
are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or
prosecution by the International Criminal Court [i.e, the court that
would prosecute a Pinochet but not a Castro -- DH] whose jurisdiction
does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept." Berry: "The
rule of law in the world, then, is to be upheld by a nation that has
declared itself to be above the law. A childish hypocrisy here
assumes the dignity of a nation's foreign policy." Here we have the
problem defined. Delusional radicals like Berry would like to place
the security and freedom of Americans in the hands of international
bodies that make a slave state like Libya, the chair of its human
rights commission; in the midst of a war in which their country is
under siege, they seek to taint it as an outlaw state rather than to
defend it as the beacon of freedom it so obviously is. Their hatred
of America and ultimately themselves is that intense. The rest of us
have a charge to keep and a debt to pay to those who died for our
freedom in many wars before this one. We must reaffirm our birthright
and acknowledge the great bounties we enjoy as Americans by defending
this country not only on its military battlefields, but here at home
on the cultural war front, where a hostile movement of the political
left seeks to sap its confidence and destroy its remarkable
achievements by attacking it from within.
Wendell Berry Links
http://www.eterna.net/brtom/berry.html
The Port William Membership
http://www.eterna.net/brtom/berrypw1.html
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