Worse Before It Gets Better

TODAY CONSERVATIVES are angry about the New York Times, angry about the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, and angry about the limp wrist resolutions in the House and the Senate to deplore the Times’ declassification of the terrorist financial tracking program.

So let us step back and think a little.

This war, the War on Terror, World War IV, the war between the West and Islamism, or whatever we want to call it, is not going to be easy. President Bush never said it would. In fact, from the beginning, he said it was going to be a long war.

Obviously our trans-national secular elite does not think that the war is really a war. Perhaps that is because, as of right now, they do not feel threatened. And if they do not feel threatened then there is no threat, because they know best.

Of course, at this stage of the conflict we do not yet know how serious it is. Just as in 1938 it was possible to do some wishful non-thinking and persuade yourself that Herr Hitler had a point. The Germans had been badly treated, etc. We now know that nothing short of all-out conflict could have stopped Hitler. But in 1938, people did not know that.

Is this really a world conflict, or just a bunch of rich Muslim kids with guns and bombs who are really not worth getting into a sweat over? We don’t know.

Why wait until the threat has fully matured, you might ask? Why not finish it off with a neat 0.25 GDP war and a few thousand deaths rather than wait until it takes a WWII type effort of full national mobilization and hundreds of thousands of deaths?

No doubt that is what serious people used to worry about in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Yet maybe that is what it is going to take. After all, if the New York Times really believed that the terror threat was real then they wouldn’t have recklessly compromised national security. They would have gone to the White House for guidance, rather than to straight-arm it.

Yet think how hard it would be for them to admit that Bush is right about the War on Terror. For one thing that would mean admitting that Bush and the Republicans are right. And one thing they know in Manhattan is that they are right and fundamentalist Religious Right conservatives are wrong. So they go back to their old familiar template, reenacting their glory days. As Peggy Noonan writes:

[T]he people who run the Times now are not so much living as re-enacting. They're lost on the big new playing field of American media, and they're reenacting their great moments--the Pentagon papers, the Watergate days. They're locked in a pose: We speak truth to (bad Republican) power.

And why not reenact? It’s a vicarious excitement, a reminder of the good old days. But of course it is also putting the nation at risk. Because if you started to do some real thinking then you might have to deal with the fact of the underclass poor. How come that the underclass seemed to come after the War on Poverty? Or you might start to wonder about the vast and underperforming schools. Or you might ponder how the ranks of people on disability doubles every ten years. Best not to think about all that.

There is a natural ebb and flow in the nature of things, and things are going to have to get a lot worse before the liberals and Democrats are going to see what is right in front of their eyes and get with the program on the war on terror.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. You’d think that after 9/11, after 3/11 in Madrid, 7/7 in London, that people would be getting the idea. What will it take, do you think, for them to get serious?

Maybe it is better not to think about that. But here’s a prediction. The New York Times will never admit that Bush was right on the war on terror.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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