Somebody had faxed over a copy of the article before the issue hit newsstand. Kathleen in the office made copies for everyone in the office to read. I had been expecting forceful disagreement from those conservatives who favored invading Iraq, but I never expected anything like this — the vitriol, the name-calling, the smears, and tendentiousness.
“Unpatriotic Conservatives” was the headline of what I will always regard as David Frum’s magnum opus — a 4,000-word cover page for National Review. The piece targeted a motley crew of libertarians and conservatives who had dissented from George W. Bush’s plans for invasion, regime change, and nation-building in Iraq.
Notably to me, it targeted my boss and mentor, Bob Novak.
The ahistorical implication — that conservatives are, at heart, about bellicose foreign policy — was hardly the most absurd aspect of the piece. The overwrought language was pretty bad. This was Frum’s charge:
This more specific indictment was his fig leaf — I’m not saying opposition to war makes you unpatriotic, just that these war opponents are unpatriotic. But his evidence to support these charges ranged from weak to laughable.
Frum charged my boss with “terror denial” because Novak said al Qaeda, not Hezbollah, was the biggest threat to the United States. Frum charged Novak with “espousing defeatism,” because Novak had reported this, in late September 2001: “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.”
Stripped of its fig leaf, Frum’s article is laid bare: An attempt to purge anti-war conservatives from the Right. At the time, I wrote “Purges are radical in their nature. They are reckless, and they stifle debate. Stifling debate on the right gives the intellectual upper hand to the left.”
I also made clear that I wasn’t trying to purge Frum from the Right, despite his being steadfastly pro-choice and shaky on many issues — I was trying to stop the purging.
But now it seems that Frum may have made his final purge from the Right: Himself.
The thing is, Frum is often correct these days about the close-mindedness of the conservative movement, and the way in which purity tests and strident language hurt the cause. He has also never, to my knowledge, expressed regret or contrition for his attempts to enforce ideological purity in his own image and likeness.
After Novak’s death, Frum did, to his credit, apologize for calling Novak “Unpatriotic.” But he also said he still stood by the piece
So, now that Frum is presumably done deciding who is and who isn’t a conservative, it seems fitting to replay the conclusion of this purge of his behind which he still stands:
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
Many conservatives stood with Frum at the time that he turned his back on us conservatives who opposed the Iraq War. Now, to those more hawkish conservatives, Frum turns his back on you, too.
