In Our Wars Over the War, Victor Davis Hanson recounts “the dominant narrative of the Western Left” (of the Global War on Terror), then declares that “every element of it is false.” Some of his points:
- Prior to 9/11, the United States had given an aggregate of over $50 billion to Egypt, and had allotted about the same amount of aid to Israel as to its frontline enemies. We had helped to save Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, and received little if any thanks for bombing Christian Europeans to finish in a matter of weeks what all the crack-pot jihadists had not done by flocking to the Balkans in a decade.
- The poor in South America or Africa are not murdering civilians in North America or Europe. The jihadists are not bombing Chinese for either their godless secularism or suppression of Muslim minorities. Indeed, bin Laden harbored more hatred for an America that stopped the Balkan holocaust of Muslims than for Slobodan Milosevic who started it.
- The Patriot Act was far less intrusive than what Abraham Lincoln (suspension of habeas corpus), Woodrow Wilson (cf. the Espionage and Sedition Acts), or Franklin Roosevelt (forced internment) resorted to during past wars. So far America has suffered in Iraq .006 percent of the combat dead it lost in World War II, while not facing a conventional enemy against which it might turn its traditional technological and logistical advantages.
Hanson believes that the Left’s narrative persists because “this version of events brings spiritual calm for millions of troubled though affluent and blessed Westerners.” The “three sacraments to their postmodern thinking,” according to Hanson:
- Our first hindrance is moral equivalence.
- Our second shackle is utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’
- The third restraint is multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit.