Glenn Greenwald strikes again! The Salon blogger is up in arms over the fact that a group of conservative bloggers, including THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD’s own Brian Faughnan, have banded together to adopt a clarifyingly simple position on the war in Iraq: We Win. They Lose. Greenwald’s beef:
Greenwald goes on to compare us to actual, literal cheerleaders. And you know what, we take no offense. One might point out that there used to be a time when liberals didn’t snicker at those who rooted for this country to defeat its enemies. When Jimmy Carter told an audience in 1977 that “Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere,” I doubt there was some sarcastic lefty-blogger-to-be in the audience who said “where’s elsewhere–we live in a complicated world, man.” Or when John F. Kennedy responded to the Soviet threat against Berlin by saying, “The freedom of the city is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate with those who say, ‘What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” Did liberals make snide comments about his uncompromising refusal to negotiate? Did they ask: (a) what is freedom, (b) who precisely are “those,” and (c) what does it really mean to “negotiate”? Or how about when Franklin Roosevelt said, “We are going to win the war, and we are going to win the peace that follows.” What a simplistic worldview, Greenwald might have said. We’re not fighting just one war. There are the Germans, the Japanese, the Russians, the Chinese, etc. What will winning the peace mean–certainly not a fifty year stand-off with the Russians. Except that’s exactly what it took. Greenwald asks who are “they”? Well, they’re the bad guys, the people who are killing civilians and soldiers alike in a struggle to prevent Iraq from becoming a stable and peaceful society. And when “they lose,” all those who were able to see clearly the difference between us and them, between right and wrong, without letting petulant and defeatist nuance blind them to the truth–they’ll have been on the right side of history.
