Scrambling to condemn President Trump’s decisive and popular elimination of the world’s top terrorist, Qassem Soleimani, the New York Times filled most of a page on Jan. 6 with an editorial headlined, “Congress, stop the rush to war.” Above this alarmist sentiment masquerading as sober constitutional propriety was a threatening but fanciful photo illustration of Trump and Republican leaders, a Reaper drone, a couple of Hellfire missiles, and the glowing fireball that was the Quds Force leader’s doom.
The editorial was just days ago, but it came from a different epoch, when, if you squinted as hard as Trump’s critics did, you could see a slide to full-scale war, the result of reckless impulsiveness rather than coherent strategy. But just two days after the editorial ran in print, the president was able to go on TV and tell the public that Iran was standing down after exacting only paltry and symbolic revenge.
Some rush to war.
Let’s stipulate that Trump’s threat to target Iran’s cultural sites was wrongheaded and undermined the clear legal and moral case to be made for his hard line against Iran. It made it easy, as usual, to depict him and his administration as unthinking and devoid of any planning, plausible or otherwise. But easy answers are often lazy ones. And so it was with the Left’s reflexive outrage over the hit on Soleimani.
Joe Biden, whose record of getting foreign policy wrong is unbroken for half a century, accused Trump of being “dangerously incompetent,” of tossing a “stick of dynamite into a tinderbox,” and of putting Iran in “the driver’s seat” in the Middle East. He and others in the Democratic Party and presidential primary field, plus the usual bien-pensants, suggested there was a glaring contradiction between Trump’s destruction of Soleimani and his promise to keep America out of unnecessary wars.
But as Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue Of Nationalism, tweeted, “1. Pulling US forces out of Iraq, while 2. Holding Iran responsible for violent actions against America — That is a coherent policy. “
1. Pulling US forces out of Iraq, while
2. Holding Iran responsible for violence actions against Americans—
That is a coherent policy.
I disagree with those saying its internally contradictory.
It’s the best course available.
— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) January 8, 2020
The New York Times editorial also posed a question. Responding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s suggestion of temporary turbulence in the Middle East — “it may be that there’s a little noise here in the interim” — the prune-lipped gray lady asked, “Would Mr. Pompeo consider a vote by the Parliament in Baghdad noise?”
The answer is probably yes, and it should be. The Iraqi legislature took a nonbinding and symbolic vote to expel American forces from the country. But Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi also said U.S. troops would leave according to a timetable, which means nothing, and his letter to Parliament emphasized Iraq’s neutrality between Washington and Tehran.
Trump’s “rush to war” critics — that’s most of the news media — made a meal out of the vote, suggesting it loosened America’s grip on a dangerously unstable region of the world. But it was really no more than an effort to help Iran save face while it contemplated its regional humiliation.
The mad mullahs raged impotently like King Lear on the blasted heath: “I will have such revenges … I will do such things —What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” These terrors turned out to be damp squibs — a few missiles lobbed with ineffective pyrotechnics into a wasteland. It was what Gen. Colin Powell once referred to as “bouncing rubble” or, better, an actual manifestation of pounding sand.
As our editorial points out, “World War III” trended (absurdly) on Twitter. It’s a tribute to the power of vacuous alarmism on social media. Instead, we saw a shocked local bully trying to look unbowed after being given a bloody nose by a serious power. The bully can be expected to sneak out again and attack an innocent victim from behind. That’s what he does. So the foreign policy success of the past week has not yet been fully accounted. But the mania and delusions of anti-Trumpian responses in the past week have outstripped perhaps anything we have seen in three years.
That’s what you get when you lock your dial at 11 and respond to everything done by the president you hate with mockery, outrage, disdain, contempt, alarm, and disgust — indeed with anything other than a fair-minded assessment of the known facts. When you define yourself as a resistance rather than as a government in waiting, your responses are limited in type but not in degree.
The only variation is in vehemence.
